Getting caught up
I woke up this morning with a creeping sense of shame at not having attended to my blog in such a long time. But also from really weird dreams from having watched The Ring last night. That's right. I've got several hours in a row in which I don't have to prep, grade, field questions, unpack, or anything. So I used most of it for sleep. Yesterday I received another pile of papers after having spent the weekend marking the first one. It feels like shovelling snow in a blizzard. Many of you know the feeling.
And the act of handing back graded work, of course, means that I am no longer the most beloved professor on earth among my freshmen. It has transformed them from squeakily-scrubbed, eager little adoring cherubim into snarling, wounded wolfhounds. "But Professor Newguy! I thought you liked us!" It's always the hardest part of the semester, because of my pathological need to be liked at all times. But I always get over it, because of my pathological streak of intellectual sadism. Or something like that.
Today would normally be my research day, and I have conference abstracts, article revisions, and book reviews in that pile. But like a speck of wet dust on a winter window creates whole worlds of frost spiraling out from it, the one reason I have to go to campus today has accreted a complicated apparatus of appointments and obligations.
But it's a pretty cool reason, nevertheless. It's Nowhere College's opening convocation and we all have to process (proceed?) across campus in our regalia. So my much-fetishized mediaeval robes that got towed away with the car on graduation day will finally get to see the light. I know it's silly, but hell, I always liked dressing up medieval. It's the latent, repressed D&D geek in me. I draw the line at fantasizing about defeating ogres with my +1 Holy Syllabus and a well-cast Bolt of Irony.
And the speaker at aforementioned convocation is a recent candidate for the democratic nomination. Not, you know, the one I'd like to see, the one who owes me all the volunteer hours, but still, it'll be cool. Shake up the highly G.O.P. burgh of Nowhere, WI a bit.
In other recent news, I'm acquiring a gang. Of sorts. There aren't many faculty here my age, or even close. Turns out, in fact, that I AM the baby, being a matter of months younger than LB, Asst. Prof. of Biology. But there are maybe five or six of us who are recent enough and have enough ironic distance from the N.C. Mission Statement to have a sense of humor about everything. And it's two archaeologists, a Spanish teacher, and a Biologist, which wouldn't happen if I'd gotten a job at a larger place. One of the perquisites of institutional tininess: forced interdisciplinary cocktail discussions.
Something that I'm noticing more and more is that Nowhere is very much a BYOP sort of place. If you don't have a partner when you arrive here(which everyone on the faculty but me did) you are not finding anyone in the area. It's looking like a couple years of third, fifth, and seventh wheel-hood for me. Which is okay, but a little discouraging.
Other things of note include: a recently discovered prairie conservancy with good walking paths; the one decent coffee shop in the area, Oshkosh's New Moon Cafe; let's see, what else? Oh! At one of the ubiquitous department meetings yesterday (we're FIVE people! Why do we need so many meetings?), it was decided that there won't be as much Freshman Comp to teach next term as we thought, so I have an empty teaching slot for whatever course I want to dream up. I think I'm going to teach my course on Hell: the evolution of ideas about the afterlife, hell, devils, etc. and their representation in literature, from Homer to Flann O'Brien and Neil Gaiman.
Your suggestions for names for this course are welcome. Something like "To Hell with Lit" seems a good idea, but I'm sure we can all come up with something better.
And the act of handing back graded work, of course, means that I am no longer the most beloved professor on earth among my freshmen. It has transformed them from squeakily-scrubbed, eager little adoring cherubim into snarling, wounded wolfhounds. "But Professor Newguy! I thought you liked us!" It's always the hardest part of the semester, because of my pathological need to be liked at all times. But I always get over it, because of my pathological streak of intellectual sadism. Or something like that.
Today would normally be my research day, and I have conference abstracts, article revisions, and book reviews in that pile. But like a speck of wet dust on a winter window creates whole worlds of frost spiraling out from it, the one reason I have to go to campus today has accreted a complicated apparatus of appointments and obligations.
But it's a pretty cool reason, nevertheless. It's Nowhere College's opening convocation and we all have to process (proceed?) across campus in our regalia. So my much-fetishized mediaeval robes that got towed away with the car on graduation day will finally get to see the light. I know it's silly, but hell, I always liked dressing up medieval. It's the latent, repressed D&D geek in me. I draw the line at fantasizing about defeating ogres with my +1 Holy Syllabus and a well-cast Bolt of Irony.
And the speaker at aforementioned convocation is a recent candidate for the democratic nomination. Not, you know, the one I'd like to see, the one who owes me all the volunteer hours, but still, it'll be cool. Shake up the highly G.O.P. burgh of Nowhere, WI a bit.
In other recent news, I'm acquiring a gang. Of sorts. There aren't many faculty here my age, or even close. Turns out, in fact, that I AM the baby, being a matter of months younger than LB, Asst. Prof. of Biology. But there are maybe five or six of us who are recent enough and have enough ironic distance from the N.C. Mission Statement to have a sense of humor about everything. And it's two archaeologists, a Spanish teacher, and a Biologist, which wouldn't happen if I'd gotten a job at a larger place. One of the perquisites of institutional tininess: forced interdisciplinary cocktail discussions.
Something that I'm noticing more and more is that Nowhere is very much a BYOP sort of place. If you don't have a partner when you arrive here(which everyone on the faculty but me did) you are not finding anyone in the area. It's looking like a couple years of third, fifth, and seventh wheel-hood for me. Which is okay, but a little discouraging.
Other things of note include: a recently discovered prairie conservancy with good walking paths; the one decent coffee shop in the area, Oshkosh's New Moon Cafe; let's see, what else? Oh! At one of the ubiquitous department meetings yesterday (we're FIVE people! Why do we need so many meetings?), it was decided that there won't be as much Freshman Comp to teach next term as we thought, so I have an empty teaching slot for whatever course I want to dream up. I think I'm going to teach my course on Hell: the evolution of ideas about the afterlife, hell, devils, etc. and their representation in literature, from Homer to Flann O'Brien and Neil Gaiman.
Your suggestions for names for this course are welcome. Something like "To Hell with Lit" seems a good idea, but I'm sure we can all come up with something better.
posted by James at 6:26 AM
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