i have been pondering anthony's suggestion of the golden pradas (see his comment on the last post) but no. i hate flats. it has something to do with not having dainty feet; flats tend not to suit me. but mostly it's because i can't get over their metaphorical literalness, if you'll allow me to say that: their "flatfootedness." there's no wit to flats. worse, as with birkenstocks, flats have always suggested to me a person who would say "my comfort is paramount, far more important than your aesthetic pleasure." it would kill me to be such a person. i cringe just thinking about it. shoes are all about putting visual thrill out there in the world, for myself and for others. even when they hurt, they give me huge, if masochistic, satisfaction.

here is how i solved my problem. tell me you still feel a tiny bit of a thrill?

and yes, i'm afraid that's it for now. the week is coming at me like a water cannon, and i haven't so much as a slicker for protection.

Terrible truth

for ethical reasons i won't blog about my students, which means it's been hard to write much over the last week. and who am i kidding, it's been hard to find ten uninterrupted minutes. going back into the classroom after being away for so long is shocking, exciting, depleting, disorienting, sobering, thrillingly scary, and absolutely crammed with realizations, most of them banal yet resonant. among them: teaching is tiring. it takes an incredible amount of energy to respond to 40 people at once. i'm not exactly complaining; i don't mind the work; it's just hard. it's like cooking a multi-course dinner party for a dozen friends. several hours into the prep, your fingers pruny and your feet aching, you find yourself wondering how this ever seemed like a good idea. when the wine starts flowing and conversation pools around the candlelight, though, it's all good.

and then there's all the other beginning-of-term stuff that ramps up. meetings, to be sure, and graduate student committees, and proposal-writing workshops, and office hours and major grant deadlines and so on, but also the socializing. next week i will be out monday, tuesday, wednesday, friday, and saturday evenings, entertaining visitors, attending talks, putting in an appearance at the obligatory department party. again, it's not that i don't enjoy it (well, okay, i could live without twinkling at the dep't party); it's just that after about 90 minutes of hanging out with anybody, i need a nap.

around the time that cycle ends, grading will start coming in.

all of this is doable, i keep saying, as long as i pace myself. right? right??

but the truly heartbreaking realization -- banal yet resonant -- is this: i am actually going to have to break down and get myself some comfortable shoes.

now, that i might not surive.

Best saturday things

• finding the mousetraps empty
• having the market to myself
  
• running into leslea at amy's AGA show
  
• albrecht durer's trees
• getting a pass from the parking patrol
• dropping off flowers to a friend
• a free night.
  

Bad feminist

the following ad floated to the top of the debris pile otherwise known as my inbox the other day, advertising the newly reconstituted faculty women's club (originally called the faculty wives' club, if memory serves):

The Wine & Cheese Social will be an opportunity for both newcomers and returning members to check out the club and our many activities: from Art Gallery Tours to Golf, Book Groups to Bridge, or Gourmet Dining to Dog Walking - just to name a few. We have activities that meet during the day, in the evening, and even occasionally on the weekends.

i know i'm not supposed to feel envious -- but, wow: what kind of a charmed life would you lead if you had time to take in dog walking groups?

The fray

today was my first day of teaching in something like two and a half years, and i've been nervous about it for some time. (hmmm, could that be what the terrible back-and-neck pain is about? nah...) would i remember how to manage a class? would i recognize my students? would they respect me? okay, let me be honest -- would they like me? do i still care about that? and how do i feel about caring or not caring? am i patient enough for teaching? is the syllabus organized? have i thought of everything? OMG, i need a key and a code for the smart room. what if they hate iclicker, what if they hate world writing in english, what if they act snooty and superior? and what am i going to wear? (yes, chie mihara shoes, but what else?)

there were a few mishaps. for one thing, i went to the wrong room. i teach in the humanities centre on thursdays and the business building on tuesdays but somehow i got it backwards and walked right into BUS 4-13 at 2:00 today. as karma would have it, there was an MBA class there. after i raised my question ("uh, do we perhaps have a scheduling conflict?"), the prof said, "oh, you seemed so pleasant i thought you were going to ask whether you could be in my class!" then he put his hand on my back and leaned in. i was so flustered by the whole thing that i didn't really absorb it at the moment, but in retrospect i kind of (kind of) wish i'd said, "no, no, that was last week's plan B. since then my partner has convinced me that i'm already qualified for whatever an MBA would qualify me to do, and besides, the ethos in the b-school is just way. too. conservative, so i'm moving on to plan C, which is to become an electronic mashup artist."

what i actually said was, "oh! no! uh, no, that's not it at all." then i pointed stupidly to my syllabus, which clearly stated the wrong information. the prof canvassed the class, none of whom proved to be english 123 students, and then acted very solicitously (in the other sense), walking me down to the admin offices where i called the english department which, reliably enough, gave me the totally wrong information ("you're supposed to be in tory 1-107!"), allowing me to deduce, all on my own, where to go.

so, yeah, i was late. and i was nervous. my timing is off; the classes weren't paced well. and there are many mistakes on my syllabus: readings listed that i've since learned we won't be able to do, unconfirmed class visits, days titled something provisional like "web 2.0" or "local writing." most dreadfully of all, the assignments don't add up to 100%. i hate being a stereotype of an english professor.

but the most surprising thing to me is how much poorer my memory is. i used to memorize every student's name in the first class. before your eyebrows head to the stratosphere, i had a simple trick: get students talking about themselves and listen with one ear. meanwhile, use your real attention to write down something visually striking about them. you have to give yourself permission to write whatever strikes you: "porn star," "pig eyes," "plain girl," "vivacuous" (which is my favorite student neologism of all time). of course, you must burn this piece of paper later that night. my theory is that meeting someone is an overwhelming experience, there's so much coming at you at once: visual details, mannerisms, emotions, expressions, stories, hopes, desires. it takes a certain length of time to quiet the riot in the brain, and the discipline of focusing your attention on the one visual detail that will connect a name to a body helps.

anyway, i tried to do that this morning. i had the students reveal their favorite book or movie or band. while they talked, i tried to jot something down about their physical appearance, things that might trigger my memory five days from now, when i see them again. even at the time i thought it was choppy, but when i got back to my office afterward i could see what a total disaster it was. my notes do not say things like "meathead" or "aniston hair" (not that anybody does that anymore, but you take the point) or "generic white boy," all of which would be meaningful to me; they say things like "blonde" or "glasses" or "headband." the last is particularly disappointing, since one of the tacit rules of this exercise is that you do not focus on the ephemeral -- maybe he's the kind of student who wears a preppy sweater, but he could just be behind on his laundry, or terribly ironic -- whereas a descriptor like "pinhead" will identify him even in a metallica t-shirt.

so, i have no idea what anybody's named, and will have to struggle along through the class list. what i'm left wondering is why i failed. am i just out of practice? and if so, unpracticed at what: meeting people? memorizing? or being blunt? is the problem that there is so much noise in my head now that i can't actually see people for themselves? or is the failure not about memory or distraction but about cognition: is it harder to multi-task now? and that, in turn, makes me wonder what other pleasures of aging might be in store.

Kafka's workshop

i don't know whether it's years of working with students, who are themselves infantilized at every turn, a weird protestant frame of mind, or a historical hangover from the mid-1990s, but the cheapness of this place floors me. i try to be a professional, but unfortunately it's in spite of the roadblocks in my department.

for those of you who think being a professor in english at the university of alberta is all bonbons and choice parking spots, let me disabuse you. here is a partial list of the things i pay for:

• a computer. that is, if you're not comfortable using good ol' wax tablets. if you buy a computer on a research grant, the university owns it -- but you have to pay for repairs. is there tech support? sure! at the moment, there are 3 guys for over 300 professors, half a dozen digital humanities research labs, and hundreds of teaching websites.
• photocopying. i've just had a big fight with our administrator over this one. there's a new system in place -- but we're only allowed to transfer a certain number of our old copies to the new system. "photocopies are a liability," she explained to me. "you were given an allotment for a given year; if you didn't use them, i wonder why not." uh, because i'm trying to use less paper? because i was on sabbatical? because the last year i was teaching full-time i ended up on medical leave? any of those sound legit? but why am i photocopying on the first day of teaching anyway, you ask?: because although my first-year english course was designated full and closed according to the student registration system, it turns out that someone else in english has been enrolling students hand over fist during the last three days. don't even start me on this.
• letterhead: yeah, that's right. we get an allotment of l/h at the beginning of the school year, and if we need more -- for instance, because more than a dozen students request letters of reference -- we have to go and ask a secretary for more. she will pause before unlocking the cupboard, to ask, "how many more sheets do you need?"
• whiteboard markers. okay, technically, you can request 2 at the beginning of the schoolyear, but if you lose them, replacements are on you.
• voicemail, long distance, voicemail-to-email: here's how it works. every three months you get a receipt for your administrative expenses. on the front page is a total, usually under ten dollars. stapled to this front page is the evidence, mostly strips of paper cut from a massive detailed phone bill. if these calls were made for "legitimate business expenses" -- if, for example, you're a graduate coordinator recruiting students from outside the 780 area code -- you can write an explanatory note on this bill and return it, and the department will pay for those specific calls. are your eyes swimming? exactly. think of this: it is somebody's job to go through the phone bill for a department of 56 professors, 20-30 sessionals, 120 graduate students and 8.75 non-academic staff members and scissor out long distance charges, access-code by access-code, in order to recoup this money. now, when long distance was ten cents a minute within canada and we were facing 21% budget cuts, this was perhaps -- perhaps -- understandable. (in one of the most gob-smacking trades of all time, the department of philosophy in '94-'95 got rid of professors' telephones completely, in order to maintain research assistantships for their students.) but in the twenty-first century? what's the fear, that we'll go hog-wild on long distance? jesus h. christ.

this kind of nickeling and diming takes a toll. it tells instructors that they are not professionals, that the work of teaching and learning, research and administration, should be done just like it was done in graduate school. result: we internalize this ethos, we become bad professionals. and the money issues bleed out into other things, more serious things, like time (oh, i'd love to go to my kid's soccer game, but this article was due yesterday), attention (i'll check my email just one last time before i go to bed), or a sense of self-worth.

practices like these also tell department members that they are not trusted, and that "the department" (whatever that is) does not care about the quotidian concerns of its teaching staff. it downloads the importance of teaching onto instructors: if it's important enough to write on the board, you'll find a whiteboard marker! if you want to use new technologies, you'll figure out how to build, fix and maintain them yourself!

don't we hear such messages about teaching and learning from the general public often enough? do we really need it at home, too?

Library stacks

i wasn't far into my job when i learned that the life of the mind involved less reading than you might imagine. i started a stack of books called "books to read this summer." when the summer of 1994 came and went, i started a new stack of "books to read this summer," and moved the unread to "books to read next summer." when i had three years of summer reading piled up, i started a stack called "books to read upon my retirement." what's next, "books to read before i die"?

every sabbatical is an opportunity to start anew. and every sabbatical ends with the glum realization that, once again, i have read far less than i meant to. here is a record of my misspent time, organized according to the tippy stack of books i will schlep back to the university this week, unread:

• mike davis, planet of slums and david harvey, the new imperialism. i was going to read these in service of a doctoral student's project. maisaa defended her thesis back in january. oh well.
  
• brian massumi, parables of the virtual. i bought the book because i was intrigued by the following: "critical thinking disavows its own inventiveness as much as possible. because it sees itself as uncovering something it claims was hidden or as debunking something it desires to subtract from the world, it clings to a basically descriptive and justificatory modus operandi. however strenuously it might debunk concepts like 'representation,' it carries on as if it mirrored something outside itself with which it had no complicity, no unmediated processual involvement, and thus could justifiably oppose. prolonging the thought-path of movement, as suggested here, requires that techniques of negative critique be used sparingly. the balance has to shirt to affirmative methods: techniques which embrace their own inventiveness and are not afraid to own up to the fact that they add (if so meagerly) to reality." still sounds promising. but 256 pages of massumi? i started blogging instead.
  
• latin american spanish: been there, done that. sorta.
• henry giroux, the university in chains, george fallis, multiversities, ideas and democracy, james cote and anton allahar, ivory tower blues, clark kerr, the uses of the university: guess i never did write that book about the contemporary university.
• CD the dreaming gate. "enter a shamanic 'dreamtime' with the entrancing didgeridoo music of inlakesh and hemi-sync (TM)." fine. i'm never going to crack the cellophane. but why on earth, you might be wondering, do i even own such a thing? spite. i did a leadership training thing at the banff centre last fall. it was generally good, but they hired a chiropractor to do one of the sessions, and i hated him. we all did. (jen, you're reading: am i right?) he was at once simplistic and self-satisfied, offering the most simple-minded advice you could imagine. cleaning him out of free CDs was our way of trying to recoup the hours of our time he soaked up without apology or shame.
• naomi klein, the shock doctrine. wait, no, that stays. i am totally going to read this book. any day now.
• douglas coupland, the gum thief. in hard cover. what was i thinking?
• houston wood, native features: indigenous films from around the world. houston, my friend, i love you. and i am glad, very glad, to own your book. but, uh, i didn't get around to actually reading it. yet.
  
• barbara gowdy, helpless. wait, i have a new barbara gowdy? for real? i love her! wow. oh, what a treat.
  
• buenos aires, a cultural history. if i didn't finish reading it in BA, i'm unlikely to finish reading it here. still, it's such a good book i think i'll leave it in the reading stack for now. i'll read it when i finish tomas eloy martinez's the tango singer. also in the stack.
  
• sun tzu, the art of war. i bought this thinking it might be helpful before heading back to the faculty of arts. and who knows, it might. that stays in the stack.
• chip kidd, the learners and the cheese monkeys. now that he's not coming for exposure this fall.... oops. wasn't supposed to spill those beans. on the other hand, i did read alison bechdel's the fun home, which is a marvelous story of her relationship with her dad: complicated, recursive, intensely literary, funny.
• john mcphee, annals of the former world. as i recall, i was reading this 696-page book around the time i joined facebook, so it's there under favorite books, making me look mannered and self-important (yet not so mannered and self-important that certain high school friends are afraid to befriend me). it's a geology of basin-and-range land formations across the united states. it goes with ellen meloy's three books, also still in the unread stacks: the anthropology of turquoise, eating stone and the last cheater's waltz. they stay, this trio, reminders and models of what nonfiction can be.
• steve fuller, the intellectual. here's what it says on the back: "covering the intellectual from ancient greece to post-9/11, steve fuller introduces past exemplars -- voltaire, sartre, bertrand russell -- alongside many living examples, in this fascinating road-map to the intellectual life." is it really a road-map to the intellectual life? 'cause, like, that would be totally useful. on the other hand, how can you write a history of the intellectual in under 200 pages? on the third hand, short is good, i actually might read a book that short.

that's not bad, right? i've got rid of some stuff? still in the stack, to be read any day now: three books by rebecca solnit, mike davis's in praise of barbarians, fiction by coetzee, erdrich, vassanji, oliver sacks's musicophilia. oh, and the taschen twentieth-century design book. maybe i'll start there, just a quick browse ...