Breathing easier

I feel as though I can now justify the money I spent to get to MLA to attempt to get a new job this Christmas. I finally got a call and one of the schools I applied to -- let's call it Desert State University for the sake of anonymity, just in case I end up moving there -- wants to interview me. That's a weight off my mind. Desert State is thousands of miles away from my primary family (not necessarily a bad thing), and they have a law school that excites M's transferring juices. Apparently there's lots of Native American law to learn and practice there.

It's not my top choice, but it is the first search committee that wants to offer me an interview. And there are no rejections yet. Furthermore, the sterling Liberal Arts college that would be my first choice wrote to ask for writing samples today. So it's been a good job-market day.

And also not a bad teaching day, although the starting center of the basketball team failed my class today and so I have complaining coaches to look forward to. One of my students turned in what may well be a publishable argument on Faerie Queene III.iv. Bizarre. It was about the best undergrad essay I've ever seen. Maybe I should co-author an article with her. What could we lose?

And another gem from English 110

"The significance of seeing someone you have grown to love is completely devastating."

Genius

Submitted for your amusement and appreciation of my agony, here is a diplomatically edited paragraph -- verbatim and faithful to the punctuation -- from one of my students' essays. The assignment was to imaginatively direct a scene from Henry V in order to make an argumentative interpretation about the play. Please keep in mind that this is university-level writing, and that we have spent four weeks discussing this play, including two days on the scene in question (1.2).

The room holds the ambassador, played by Napoleon Dynamite, his charter adds humor. I thought it would be good to add humor because the play as written is to serious. The ambassador has no lines in this scene, he just stands there with his infamous blank stair. Exeter has one line, and he is played by a young Huge Grant, I'm my opinion he looks the part. With the use his English accent he tells Henry that the Dauphine has sent him a present "tennis balls my, liege." (1.2.259) This upsets Henry played by Ashton .Kutcher. Ashton is best suited for the role as he too struggles with the image of being a grown up with a child like mind. Henry's right hand men (Exeter and The Ambassador) represent the same inner power struggle that Henry himself is going through. With one man funny and the other pushing to be serious

I especially enjoy the use Huge Grant's English accent, but I'm not sure casting Huge is such a great choice. That guy is to serious.

Disconnected thought-kibbles

Here's me avoiding grading. I can't bear looking at the papers. I want to keep liking my students and thinking they're intelligent. Grading prevents that. So I let my mind wander instead:

• Know what'd be a good name for a Mötley Crüe cover band? "Ünnecessary Ümlaüt."
• I Googled myself again (see what I mean about avoiding the grading?); turns out there was someone of my name (even my somewhat weird spelling) working as a barrister at the Old Bailey in 1807.
• Secrecy within English Department seacrh committees is a leaky vessel indeed. My dissertation director sends fact-finding e-mails to department chairs, and I've got friends on search committees who apparently don't find it an ethical bind to let me know how their search process is going. Thank goodness English profs don't run the CIA, I guess.
• They recovered M's car: broken to pieces and burning in a hospital parking lot. Sinister, eh? I thought the burning indicated that the thieves used the car to commit a crime, and for a moment I thought "Well, at least they put it to some use; that's more comforting than blind stupid violent destruction." But then of course it struck me that a crime that required fire to destroy evidence is likely not to be a good thing, so perhaps it's not a prefereable thought.
• Man U beats Chelsea. I don't know how I feel about that. Chelsea losing is good, but does that mean that Man U winning is good? These difficult moral quandaries that make up adult life!
  

More auto woe

You're not going to believe this. They recovered M's car on Thursday, parked in an illegal spot (but which Milwaukee seems to have nothing else). It was towed, at her expense, and she picked it up Friday while I was on the way to Milwaukee to try to lend my assistance. Broken window, cracked open steering column, missing iPod shuffle, but other than that, no damage. Half a tank of gas, even. We went to buy a steering wheel club so it wouldn't get stolen again, and in the 30 minutes we had to leave it alone, it was stolen again. Twice in 27 hours. I had to try not to laugh while M freaked out, but she soon saw the absurdity herself.

Milwaukee, apparently, is a really shitty place to have a car, though one can't really get along without one because there's not very good public transit either. And of one is attempting to carry on a commuter relationship, it's pretty much a necessity. But M's had her car stolen twice, and I can't seem to find a 10-foot stretch of Milwaukee in which to park legally. I've had six parking tickets, and the latest one was apparently or parking at night on the wrong side of a street that has NO signs anywhere indicating any sort of parking codes. And no one parked in front or behind me had a ticket. Maybe a parking ticket is just my price of admission to this town.

Good news and bad

After two weeks of devoting almost every spare minute to it, I revised and resubmitted an article just under the deadline in the wee hours this morning, and I just found out that the journal is going to publish it. Hooray for peer-reviewed online journals! I still desperately need sleep, and I'd kill right now for a library that subscribed to ELR, and having everything else on the back burner for a week means that I have a floor-to-ceiling pile of papers to grade this weekend, but at least now I can go on the job market with another article on my CV.

And the karmic accounts are balanced by the fact that M got her car stolen.

Vsurping auctoritie over ye man

There are some days of teaching when I'm not entirely sure what the students are thinking. Am I molding their young minds, freeing them from the labyrinth of their limited experience and granting them daedalian wings to soar into the sky, or am I just pissing them off by being too blatantly and gleefully subversive?

Then again, I don't really care. I do what has to be done. For example, after having mis-cited and mis-quoted 1 Timothy 2 t'other day and obviously pissing all the evangelicals off by suggesting that their churches tend selectively to ignore the more backward and misogynistic statements of Saint Paul, I felt it was my duty to repeat the exercise in a more scholarly fashion, so I looked up the passage in the 1568 Bishops' Bible, the version Edmund Spenser would no doubt have been most familiar with while writing the Faerie Queene in the 1580s.

For those of you who are too heathen to recall the passage offhand, here's that version of 1 Timothy 2:9-15. "I wyll," Paul writes

9 Lykewyse also the women, that they araye them selues in comely apparell, with shamefastnesse, and discrete behauiour, not in brayded heere, either golde or pearles, or costly aray: 10 But (that becommeth women professyng godlynesse) through good workes. 11 Let the woman learne in scilence in all subiection. 12 But I suffer not a woman to teache, neither to vsurpe auctoritie ouer ye man, but to be in scilence. 13 For Adam was first fourmed, then Eue. 14 And Adam was not deceaued: but the woman beyng deceaued, was in the transgression. 15 Notwithstandyng through bearyng of chyldren she shalbe saued, yf they continue in fayth and loue, and holynesse, with modestie.

Citing this language at least allowed me to get off the hook, because it's clear that Christians have been selectively ignoring this passage for centuries. Preaching this passage in the 1550s was enough to get your ears whacked off, since for some reason Queens Mary and Elizabeth both took umbrage at the prohibition against their vsurping auctoritie over ye man. And if that weren't bad enough, in the 1590s it was pretty clear that Elizabeth was never going to saue herself through bearyng of chyldren. Damn, 'Postle Paul! You best not say that too loud!

So that allowed me to make a nice point about Spenser's anxieties of writing about women in authority and their sexualities, but I had to push it just a little further. Having a girlfriend in law school makes me more than usually attentive to legal arguments. I checked in with her on the logic of Paul's evaluation of Genesis: "If two people commit the same crime, but one is deceived into doing so and the other one is not, which one is more 'in the transgression'?"

It turns out that in the eyes of the law, as I half-suspected, Adam would be more culpable, having a greater mens rea, and that since, in American courts, at least, "fraud vitiates consent" (dig that crazy law-talk), Eve should have received a more lenient punishment than what she was actually saddled with -- the responsibility for original sin, centuries of inferiority complex, and, as Paul chipperly points out, the redeeming penance of labor pains.

I pointed out to my students that if the Garden of Eden had been in Wisconsin and, instead of Yahweh, a district court bench had caught the pair hastily sewing fig leaves, men would be redeeming themselves in childbirth today. Some of them laughed, but I swear at least one or two of the little buggers was jotting down notes to report me to David Horowitz as a liberal thought policeman.