English Matters

A desperately confused book review by Joan Acocella has touched off a flurry of corrective reactions from the online linguistics community, including two excellent posts by Mark Liberman at the blog Language Log. Acocella’s confusion is rooted in an inability to distinguish two meanings of the word “rule.” She goes ballistic over the fact that linguists disparage prescriptive usage rules, but at the same time insist that languages are structured by rules. Hypocrites!

I’ll use an analogy that I use in class. I stole it (with modifications) from Steven Pinker, but I’m not ashamed, because he probably stole it from somebody else.

The rules of language come in two varieties, like laws. You can break the laws of New York City, but you can’t break the laws of physics.

Think about this sentence: “You can’t turn right on red in New York City.” In one sense this is true. If you turn right on red in the Five Boroughs, the NYPD is empowered to write you a ticket. But in another sense, it’s absurd. You certainly can turn right on red in New York. I’ve seen it done hundreds of times – when the NYPD didn’t see it.

Now think of this sentence: “You can’t turn downwards in New York City, burrow through the pavement, and drive on subway tracks.” I think we can say with some confidence that you really can’t do that, except in a science-fiction movie. Cars can’t penetrate asphalt, at least not more than an inch or two, before they’re compelled to stop.

(Now, you might say that I’ve broken the rules for modal verbs in my examples. But that’s just a smaller example of my point. Everybody says “you can’t” when they mean “you may not,” just as everybody says “they” when they mean “he or she,” and just as they say “the White House” when they mean President Obama, or “It’s just what I needed” when their Aunt Melva gives them a crocheted toilet-roll cover for Christmas. Everybody understands what everybody else means extremely well in each of these linguistic situations.)

There’s a certain type of linguistic rule that you definitely can break, in the same way that you can turn right on red in New York. My neighbor broke several of these linguistic traffic laws yesterday in the course of explaining the deficiencies of the existing shelving in his wife’s sewing room.

“She cain’t do nothin’ with them shelves of hers,” he confided to me.

Where do I begin. My neighbor used /e/ in the word “can’t” instead of /æ/. He used /n/ at the end of “nothing” instead of /ŋ/. He used the dreaded “double negative” – “can’t do nothing” – which some would insist works out to a single positive. He used “them” as a determiner in the noun phrase “them shelves,” instead of saying “those shelves.” And he used the pleonastic, periphrastic genitive “of hers,” instead of merely saying “her shelves.”

So what did I say in reply? “Please rephrase! I cannot understand your faulty grammar and phonetics!” Well, no. I said “That’s a shame.” Because after all, she coul’n't do nothin’ with them shelves.

My neighbor executed a possible but proscribed sentence in my hearing, analogous to a cabbie making a flawless right turn on red in front of me at 37th and Madison. I understood exactly what he was doing, and though I could have written him a linguistic ticket, I surely did not. To do so would have been to act like a grammar cop, and a particularly nasty cop at that, perhaps driven by a need to meet my quota of usage tickets. More importantly, to correct his “grammar” would have been to kill our neighborly relations. I would have underscored that I have an Ivy League PhD in English and that his terminal degree is a diploma from a Texas public high school. Not to mention the facts that (1) I damn well enough understood what he said; (2) my own grandparents, and I myself when I’m relaxed, woul’n't of said it different; and (3) he’s a hell of a lot more competent to fix a shelf than I am.

But what if my neighbor had defied the linguistic laws of physics? What if he’d said

“Do she shelves those with anything not can.”

I would (A) have stared at him amazed; and (B) dialled 911, because he was obviously having a stroke.

“Do she shelves those with anything not can” is a totally impossible rearrangement of an otherwise standard English sentence. No English speaker has ever uttered it, unless in the furthest grips of neurological impairment. It breaks linguistic rules that lie deep within our brains.

And that’s what linguists mean by “the rules of language.” The rules that discourage people with Ivy League PhDs from saying “She cain’t do nothin’ with them shelves” are conscious, socially prescribed rules, much like rules of traffic, or fashion, or indeed of literary style. (In fact, in some works, “she cain’t do nothin’” might be great literary style.) The rules that prevent anyone at all from saying “Do she shelves those with anything” are unconscious, second-nature features of knowing a language.

Robert Browning was born on 7 May 1812; today is his 200th birthday.

Like many readers’, my first exposure to Browning was “My Last Duchess.” It is probably the most-orally-interpreted poem ever written, and for good reasons, despite its omnipresent familiarity.

Sir, ‘t was all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace — all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least.

That’s Robert Browning in seven lines: indirection, allusiveness, verbal economy, dizzying facility with English rhyme and meter. That may be the first time anyone has ever associated “verbal economy” with Robert Browning, but I mean it in the sense that he typically packed an impressive range of meanings and ideas into few words. At the same time, he wrote countless words, so that his poems include vast stretches of hard going. Of his early long poem Sordello, he famously said late in life: “When I wrote that, God and I knew what it meant. Now only God knows.”

With his usual perverseness, Ezra Pound claimed that Sordello was a masterpiece. Most readers prefer Browning’s dramatic monologues: “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “Caliban upon Setebos,” “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church.” In these expansive, intricate poems, characters review their lives, offering realizations, rationalizations, obfuscations, and rueful observations – behaving, that is, much like real human beings, if real human beings could speak effortless blank verse. Effortlessness is the famous theme of “Andrea del Sarto”:

I do what many dream of all their lives,
—Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do,
And fail in doing. I could count twenty such
On twice your fingers, and not leave this town,
Who strive—you don’t know how the others strive
To paint a little thing like that you smeared
Carelessly passing with your robes afloat,
Yet do much less.

Verse came so easily to Robert Browning that he may have feared the fate of Andrea del Sarto. But his achievements were massive and important. They culminated in The Ring and the Book, one of the great Victorian novels, almost unread today. It’s complicated, it has an obscure historical setting, its effects are operatic and grand, and it’s in verse: you can see why people read Dickens instead. But The Ring and the Book is a milestone of incipient postmodernism. Several observer-participants tell the story of a murder. They have different interests at stake, different memories, and different styles: where does the truth reside? Almost a century later, Rashomon would become shorthand for fictions dependent on the perspective of multiple observers – but Browning had figured out how to do the Rashomon thing on a grander scale, and long before.

Even while he was making a considerable living as a professional poet, and drawing critical acclaim, Robert Browning saw his literary reputation overtaken by his celebrity. When he and Elizabeth Barrett married in 1846, they became the Brangelina of the Victorian literary world. Barrett was the better-known poet then, would write at least one poem far more famous than any of her husband’s, and would, like him, write a great verse novel that nobody reads – or at least, nobody read Aurora Leigh for a long time, till feminist critics captivated by its themes and its sheer readability vaulted it past The Ring and the Book in reputation and canonicity. For much of the 20th century, though, the Brownings were known mainly from the play The Barretts of Wimpole Street and from mandatory memorization of “My Last Duchess” or “How do I love thee?”



And from Max Beerbohm’s devastating cartoon of the long-widowed Robert “taking tea with the Browning Society.” The poet survived his wife by many years, writing the whole time, enjoying salon superstardom, but becoming less and less relevant to late-Victorian art and intellectual life. Robert struck his acquaintances as shallow and not all that smart – the contrast he posed to his extremely sharp poetry puzzled observers and led them to discount his intelligence. Henry James even wrote a story, “The Private Life,” about the discrepancy between Browning the person and Browning the poet. It’s not that either Browning ever quite became a joke, but that both, and their relationship, were sentimentalized out of significance. They were the kind of writers that, if you had unlimited money, you might build an incongruous shrine to in the middle of Texas. To love the Brownings, by the 1960s, was a sure sign of middlebrow aesthetic inertia.

And that’s a shame. It’s a shame now largely redeemed in the case of Elizabeth, who now figures as a major poet and major voice for feminist and progressive causes; but even that recuperation seems to cast a bit of shadow on her husband, whom we suspect was probably doing something to enmesh her in patriarchy. There’s little evidence for that – she wrote Aurora Leigh during their marriage – but there’s little evidence that Robert was as progressive as Elizabeth. He was no Thoreau; he wasn’t even George Eliot, for that matter. He was a writer with an incredible verbal gift, who had the even rarer gift of recognizing a “poetic moment” and conveying it with deft obliqueness. “Memorabilia” is perhaps the best example of this gift: a poem so slight that it can pass unnoticed, and once noticed, it seems to be unable to pay attention to what it’s about. But that’s only until you see that being unable to pay attention is the nature, and the minor-key tragedy, of an ephemeral existence. That minor tragedy has never been better evoked.

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you?
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems, and new!

But you were living before that,
And you are living after,
And the memory I started at—
My starting moves your laughter!

I crossed a moor, with a name of its own
And a certain use in the world no doubt,
Yet a hand’s-breadth of it shines alone
‘Mid the blank miles round about:

For there I picked up on the heather
And there I put inside my breast
A moulted feather, an eagle-feather—
Well, I forget the rest.

I should preface this post with both an apology and an explanation. Every time I sat down to think about possible blog post topics, my mind drifted back to my seminar paper topic. So this post is part self-serving opportunity to sort through my thoughts in a less formal, structured venue and part genuine desire to make more people aware of a film that has utterly captivated me these past couple weeks. That film is Ladislas Starewitch’s The Tale of the Fox.

During a round of late night research several weeks ago, I somehow ended up on a Wikipedia page listing all feature length stop motion animation films including The Tale of the Fox, which drew my attention for reasons that I’ve since forgotten (I was quite tired at the time). Ever the committed, credible scholar, I took my Wikipedia research to YouTube. Surprisingly, the entire film had been posted in six 10-11 minute videos. After the opening credits of the first video, I was confronted by one of the freakiest images I’ve seen in a while: a monkey puppet wearing glasses and a robe. His movements, particularly his curling lips that exposed his teeth and flapping tongue, seemed something straight out of my nightmares. (I’ve always been slightly creeped-out by audio-animatronics ever since a fateful ride on Disney World’s Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at the age of two, and I’m still unable to watch Jim Henson’s Labyrinth for more than five minutes before the goblin puppets make my skin crawl). But after watching the first three minutes of The Tale of the Fox, I was fairly certain I had to write about it. By the end of Part 3, I was sold. This was the most brilliantly weird, disturbing, and inspired thing I had seen in a long time. Here were animal puppets that looked, not like real live animals, but like taxidermied animals dressed up and brought to “life.” Unlike the anthropomorphic animals of the Disney films I grew up on, these animal puppets were being subjected to all manner of bodily indignities that left them mutilated, scarred, or stripped to mere bones. I knew I had to translate my frequent exclamations of, “What the ****?” and subsequent uneasy laughter into an insightful academic analysis. My obsession had begun.

Ladislas Starewitch (whose name has seemingly endless combinations of spellings) was originally an entomologist at a Natural History museum in Lithuania. In 1910, after an ill-fated attempt to shoot a short film of two stag beetles fighting (the beetles were uncooperative, fell asleep under the bright lights, and just flat-out died), Starewitch realized the dead beetles made far better actors than when they were alive and shot his film using stop motion. Many of Starewitch’s early short films utilized the preserved bodies of dead insects and birds as stop-motion puppets (See Cameraman’s Revenge and Other Fantastic Tales which can be viewed for free either on Amazon Prime Instant Video or, of course, YouTube).

Made between the years 1929 and 1930 and released in 1937 (eight months before Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves), The Tale of the Fox (Le Roman de Renard) is, according to Starewitch, his masterwork. The Tale of the Fox is an adaptation of the medieval fable of Reynard the Fox, basing its story on the 18^th century version by Goethe. As I alluded to earlier, what both fascinates and repulses me about this film is its portrayal of animal bodies. While the puppets in The Tale of the Fox aren’t real dead foxes, wolves, cats, monkeys, lions, hares, etc., the puppets were made of deer skin, among other materials. As evidenced by the photo below of Starewitch surrounded by some of his puppet creations, the puppets (some of them are quite large) were created with an extraordinary level of detail and craftsmanship.

Photo Source: (http://ikono.org/2011/07/ladislas-starevich-and-his-amazing-insects/)

In The Tale of the Fox, Starewitch has painstakingly re-creates animal bodies with astonishing detail; the animal puppets are capable of intricate and widely varied facial expressions and almost all posses unnervingly realistic mouths (lips, teeth, tongues, and even drool). But these re-created animal bodies don’t remain pristine and untouched. The film is full of lost tails, threats of flaying, animal skulls mounted on walls as trophies, multiple brutal beatings of animals by club-wielding human puppets (this is their only function in the film), and the eviscerated body of a mother hen whose chick plaintively cries, “Mama,” at the mother’s bare skull.

Yet, there’s an honesty to this film that is lacking in many other anthropomorphic animal films. It doesn’t hide the animal body, living or dead, from viewers. It refuses to ever let the viewer entirely forget that these puppets represent physical animal bodies. This contrasts with the more recent stop motion fox film, Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009). After viewing Starewitch’s film, Anderson’s film and its animal puppets (which share a similar look with The Tale of the Fox puppets) seem more cartoonish. The animals in Fantastic Mr. Fox can be electrocuted (the standard flashing of their skeletons occurs) but are apparently unharmed. When animals do die in the film, their eyes are replaced with X’s which mark the only trace of death on their bodies. The dead chickens just look like they’re sleeping; the next time we see them, they have assumed the familiar form of a plucked, ready-to-cook chicken anybody could go pick-up at the grocery store. I’m still not sure whether to read this disavowal of the physical animal body as a step in the right direction, a step back, or merely an interesting observation. But I do know that I feel more captivated by The Tale of the Fox and I’m determined to figure out why.

Coincidentally, the YouTube videos of The Tale of the Fox were posted just one month prior to Fantastic Mr. Fox’s theatrical release. Without the YouTube videos, I would have been unable to view this film. The only DVDs available for purchase are used copies ranging from $40-160, none of them in a format that will play in US DVD players. Just about the only place someone in the US can watch this film is on YouTube. Oddly enough, I think this helps the film. The Tale of the Fox possesses greater relevance now than it did 75 years ago, particularly in terms of animal studies. Starewitch’s film calls attention to the distance between humans and animals, a distance further compounded by its presence on YouTube. The film’s insistence on insistence on injuring, killing, and stripping the flesh from animal bodies momentarily breaks the spell of the anthropomorphic fable, as we are reminded that these are animals with whom we share a certain corporeal vulnerability. At the same time, the animals in the film aren’t real; they’re puppets carefully assembled by humans in a way that echoes the kind of communion with the animal body that occurs with taxidermy (particularly the anthropomorphic taxidermy that was common in the Victorian Era). So how are we, in the 21^st century watching this film on our computers, supposed to read this film and its depiction of animal bodies?

I don’t have all the answers yet. After all, my paper’s not finished – this is only a drop in the bucket. While this post has been immensely helpful for me and my paper writing, I do hope it leads people to watch The Tale of the Fox or any of Starewitch’s other films. They are fantastic technical achievements in stop motion animation, their use of animals is both confusing and intriguing, and, quite frankly, they are refreshingly quirky, weird, and unusual.

Unfortunately for my students, what gets discussed more than anything in my ENGL 1301 and 1302 courses is Taco Bueno. Its menu. Its price. Its parking lots. Okay, perhaps this is a stretch. Let me clarify before I get myself into trouble.

Every teacher has a technique. We all want to connect with our students. We all want out students to learn. And, in an ideal classroom, we all want our students to connect to the material we are teaching. To do this we try a number of techniques and strategies. Some of them bomb; others go quite well; most of them seem to fit somewhere in the middle. Like all of you, I have my own techniques to help my students connect with the material. Some of them don’t work, while others get the job done. And while I vary my examples and artifacts on a weekly basis, from an all-campus email from a high-ranking university official to an article from the New York Times, I have realized that I have one recurring example: Taco Bueno. Strange, I know. How does Taco Bueno provide material for discussion? In a class focused on issues and writing about them, how does a typical fast-food restaurant provide fodder for rhetorical discussion? Or, as my students’ faces seem to consistently ask, why the hell do we keep talking about Taco Bueno?

When I say that Taco Bueno is my recurring example, what I mean is that I am consistently trying to contextualize the material of rhetorical analysis and writing for my students. And, for me, this works best whenever I use mundane, easy-to-understand examples; i.e. Taco Bueno. This takes place in a number of ways. On a day when we are talking about claims, reasons, evidence, etc. on a general, introductory manner, I’ll provide an example to illustrate what I mean. So when I tell them that their arguments are based on a central claim, a focused idea of which they are trying to convince their audience, I’ll give them an example: “We should eat at Taco Bueno after class.” Sophisticated? No. Well-worded? Of course not. But it’s a claim, and it’s something that students can understand without difficulty. On another day we might talk about counterarguments and responding to naysayers. We discuss what exactly it means to address a naysayer respectfully and present their argument fairly and accurately: “At the same time, Todd Womble—a local manager of a Taco Bell—argues that Bell consistently uses fresher and better ingredients in their items.” We talk about finding common ground and making concessions: “Womble makes a strong point in his description of Bell’s ingredients, and he is correct to assert that Bell does in fact use fresh produce.” And we stress the importance of offering specific and strong rebuttals: “But while Womble does make strong points about Taco Bell’s ingredients, this argument does not necessarily show that Bell’s products are any ‘fresher’ than those used by Taco Bueno. If Taco Bell uses fresh tomatoes and lettuce, does this mean that Taco Bueno cannot use similar ingredients?”

By the latter half of the semester, my students are not surprised to hear something about Taco Bueno. Whenever we talk about a specific element of our papers, or discuss a new aspect of rhetorical theory and academic writing, they know that our recurring Bueno discussion will soon resume. I assume that some of them find this strange, and others probably wish that I would move on to a different example. But I do know that each of them understands exactly what these Taco Bueno examples mean, and this is why I continue to use them. In order for lower-level composition students to advance to higher-level rhetorical writing, we must challenge them to think in new and uncomfortable ways. But I feel strongly that they must first recognize and comprehend the basic elements and conventions before they move on to these challenges. And, for me, using unsophisticated examples like convincing your roommate where you want to go to dinner, or arguing about which fast-food joint offers better hot sauce and a bigger parking lot, allows me to be sure that my students do understand what exactly a claim is, how you go about formulating a reason, what it means to address a naysayer, etc.

This does not come from reading articles or books about pedagogy, and I know that no one ever advised me to find a fast-food restaurant to clarify my teaching. Instead, I think this comes from years spent in a classroom as a student, struggling to understand the material in front of me. As a student, I know what it’s like to be confused and frustrated with the subject matter. I can empathize with my students whenever they are clueless about an assignment or unsure about how to start their essay. I have felt the same way. And in my own experiences, whether in a freshman mathematics course or a graduate seminar on literary theory, the best way I was able to overcome this confusion and grasp some sort of comprehension was through contextualization via clear and easy-to-understand illustrations and examples. I still use these examples when I re-encounter certain theories or confusing analyses today, and they continue to help me. I don’t want to patronize my students, and I know that a move beyond these simplistic arguments is the goal. But a foundation built on understanding and comprehension undoubtedly fosters more productive attempts at achieving this goal.

Borrowing from the teachers that have helped me in the past, I want to enable my students in their efforts to “master” rhetorical argument and composition. And for me, recurring examples like Taco Bueno help me to do this.  To a certain extent, you probably do this same thing. What’s your Taco Bueno?

To proudly proclaim to your students when you walk into the classroom that you are anal retentive and a bit obsessive is one of the many luxuries bestowed upon the Freshman Composition instructor. Personally I delight in the fact that those students that are brave enough to take my 1302 class after a harrowing experience the previous semester have been successfully infected by the contagion that is my own anal retentiveness. It gives me great pleasure when, after a month or two of nothing but dress slacks and drab neckties, the students see me stride into the classroom in rather pedestrian khakis and an almost scandalously informal short-sleeve shirt. I can easily register the shock on their faces. It is the same expression that greets me when I fail to show up to the door at precisely ten ‘til the hour. The routine and the infallibility of the system of norms that has been mechanically established every day for the past few months has been disturbed, and there is a little small voice in everyone’s head that is present in all good obsessives that whispers quietly that something is not right.

We have all had that professor, instructor, high school teacher, or coach that has figuratively beaten a rule that, although it may seem arbitrary at the time, becomes so intricately lodged in our psyches that it cannot be easily flushed out even in adulthood. The use of the subjective “I” in argumentative writing is something that is seemingly taboo in Texas high schools and when given the opportunity to use it in college writing those students that have had this rule successfully drilled into their craniums have a reaction that is nothing less than visceral. Rarely can they use the subjective “I,” even when it is explicitly permitted and most inevitably balk at the abyss of this infinite freedom of expression. This kind of “banal systemization” is not uncommon. I for one had the pleasure of having a philosophy professor at Texas Tech University scar me for life when he kindly informed me that “I had no opinion and no voice” and that all he needed to see in the papers I submitted were the synthesized points of view of experts, those that had a degree. This kind of intellectual hazing undoubtedly breeds anal retentiveness, but it is not a successful pedagogy.

A pedagogy of anal retentiveness necessarily involves the instructor becoming a contagion in regards to their students. I once, in a jocular manner and after several attempts at trying to explain why the phrase “a lot,” (one of my own pet peeves) at least in the particular paper, was a phrase that was not acceptable, resorted to telling the student that whenever they thought about or actually typed the phrase “a lot” in one of their papers they should instantly picture me grasping my temples in anguish and curling in the fetal position crying. The constant attempts to explain to this particular student that in the context of their argument, one that involved a potential audience of scientists, that the phrase would appear unprofessional were all in vain. The student was well-aware, after constant explanation, why the phrase was unacceptable, but nevertheless would forget and place it in their papers. It wasn’t until they, with the help of the image of me in anguish, were able to remember to refrain from using this phrase. In this situation, my own anal retentiveness regarding a phrase of no consequence had been successfully injected into the mind of the student. My own obsession revolving around the fact that when the phrase “a lot” is used in a paper that all is not right with the world, became a contagion.

Anal retentiveness, used in a colloquial sense, involves an obsessive attention to detail that stems from a desire for control and structure. It is the compulsion that fosters the correct use and placement of topic, transition, and return sentences and breeds logically cohesive paragraphs that stem from a systematic thesis statement. It is a thing of structure that allows for, if not uninhibited freedom, the possibility of the conditions for expression. For instance, every day my students are well-aware that I arrive ten minutes early so that I can write up the schedule and announcements on the dry-erase board. They are well aware that this “pocket” of time will be structured around preparation. They are aware, because I am a good anal retentive, that the schedule and announcements are always written on the far right hand side of the board. The structure and the progression of dates are well-known to them. Even the contents of this minimal portion of the dry-erase board, the schedule, can be deduced before I begin to write. It will always include what is already on the syllabus, which they may or may not have read. The key here is that they can know, only up to a point, what will fill the structure of the schedule. I might add or change a due date or put in a piece of homework, always only a little bit of course. The context cannot always be determined completely. There is always room for expansion or addition.  The content of the structure can never be completely saturated. They are aware what should be there, what form it will take, where it will be in proximity to other things, but they are never fully aware of the exact contents.

The structure of a student’s paper can be viewed in much the same way. The students, through banal systemization, read and listen to examples of how to answer the “so what?” question. They are well aware, at least I always hope, of the practical reason why this question needs to be answered. They are well aware, at least in relative proximity to other key components of their paper, where the answer to this question should “go.” They can narrow down the location, at least in the way I teach it, and know that it is after an overview of the issue, but before the thesis statement. The structure of the contents of the paper, after constant practice, is burned into the back of their brains, along with their lovely professor who becomes that voice in the depths of their head that prompts them never to leave a paper without a proper “so what?”. But the context can never be fully saturated. Like the They Say, I Say templates, there is always a subjective gap where, although the space where it occurs might be prescribed and determined, is always their own. The goal of a pedagogy of anal retentiveness is to be obsessed with structure. The goal is to know, at least to a level of certainty, where key components of a paper “go” so that an outline of sorts is manifest immediately and the paper becomes something like a grid for their thoughts and/or argument to be poured into and properly sifted. A pedagogy of anal retentiveness, contrary to popular opinion, is not totalitarian. To become a contagion for your students, so that you (or perhaps the textbook even) become a voice in their heads compelling them almost unconsciously to do something doesn’t restrict their ideas or their arguments. To know that your paper needs a “so what” and that it must go somewhere in the vicinity of “right here” and that it must logically connect a previous portion of your paper to the next, doesn’t eliminate the fact that the gap can never be fully closed. The student must always fill in the remainder.

I am, as usual, a bit late to this game.  I am crafting my very first article for submission to a peer-reviewed journal.  The plan is to complete the piece by early summer, coinciding with the time when my teaching load goes on vacation.  The projected article actually stems from a short, five-page essay I wrote for a literature class in my doctoral studies coursework here.  My instructor had offered glowing feedback and ample, fruitful recommendations of what additional directions I could take, both in terms of supplemental research and professorial collaboration within our department.  In short, I need to expand and extend.

First of all, this entry is not meant to read as an immodest platform for my personal gloating (so, consequently, I apologize if it comes off in this manner).  No, I only recount the above accolades because I want to learn more about this task of scholarly article-writing, about its process(es).  I want it to seem less veiled, less covert a practice for those like me, those still sitting in a classroom as a student.  And maybe it already is part of our premeditated curriculum; maybe I am just tardy to this party, too.

As if on cue, my quiet thoughts were recently acknowledged.  Last week, an e-mail came through the wire about a dissertation, thesis, and ‘longer-paper’ writing workshop happening in a few weeks.  This is brilliant.  This seems like the proverbial step-in-the-right-direction for me, for my personal demystification.  Now, I do not know the origins of sessions like this, but they seem designed to elucidate, to enhance the contemporaneous gaining of scholarly experience, to run parallel to our other intellectual pursuits as graduate students.  One could argue that learning how to write a peer-reviewed journal article comes by simply reading loads of other peer-reviewed journal articles.  This sounds straightforward and direct.  After all, as an undergraduate and graduate creative writing student, my exposure to the published literary ‘greats’ that came before, being their witness, holding them as models, was a time-tested and positive practice that worked in improving my own fiction writing.  Indeed that worked, to an extent, but it needed buttressing by the nitty-gritty of peer workshopping, the get-your-hands-dirty kind of text-delving exemplified by exchanging papers and, much more importantly, ideas.

_____

I want to cite theory and criticism comprehensively and with either great respect or oblique disapproval, when appropriate.

I want to invent no less than one new term, something to add to the long-established nomenclature of my field.  It should end, obviously, with one of the following suffixes:  -esque, -zation, or the all-powerful, yet seemingly anachronistic, -ism.

I want to write long, lucid sentences: those curling serpentine things, scaled with stout, shiny language.

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In an article entitled “’Predatory’ Online Journals Lure Scholars Who Are Eager to Publish” from the March 4th issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Michael Stratford directs readers’ attention to the proliferation of so-called pay-to-publish peer reviewed journals.  As mentioned earlier, I came from a creative writing background, and thus I had a keen awareness of outfits such as Xlibris, Lulu, and iUniverse, companies willing to publish my collection of short stories for the banal ‘nominal fee.’  These firms, however, made no secret about what they did, how they crafted their intentions and/or business models.  In Stratford’s piece, however, he suggests shadier dealings: that pay-to-publish academic journals add professors, unknowingly, to their editorial boards or by burying extravagant publishing fees so cryptically within their website that authors often only discover the excessive fees until receiving some staggering ‘invoice.’  Through a deeper uncovering of editorial board recruiting practices, ‘accept-all-article’ policies, and the prevalent over-charges existent, Stratford’s article was a well-timed and quite welcomed article for me.

Forwarding the Chronicle piece to some of my mentors and colleagues, I subsequently learned about things like pay-to-publish academic-level presses as well as some potentially dubious conferences out there.  None were aware, though, of the likes of such ’suspicious’ journals mentioned in the Stratford article.  Maybe readers of this blog, by now, have already seen Stratford’s Chronicle write-up (or the almost equally interesting 29 reader comments that follow it) and do not need my evocation of it here.  I cite it more for the fact that it is a small, but characteristic, part in a much larger machine that I know very little about operating.

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A classmate, colleague, and fellow English Matters blogger, Todd Womble, introduced me to a useful website, created by the University of Pennsylvania English Department, that categorizes calls for conference papers by the numerous (though seemingly not all) sub-disciplines of English studies.  This came about following the posting of his own blog entry a few weeks back, “This is Not Breaking Bad.” While a basic library search, even just a few Google clicks, would have yielded this same resource, I’m sure, the personal and trusted guarantee that came along with Todd’s information could never replicate under an electronic search.  What does this mean?  The navigation and creation of my extracurricular academic activities is not a wholly personal affair nor comes about from a mere repetitive style of practice.  Additionally, it might also mean that the extracurricular should become the curricular.  I am a novice and I may be needy.  It helps me when I find things out from someone else in the program, whatever their level/ranking/distinction, rather than just doing a search on my own, shooting from the hip, into the vastness.

The parallel here to my own 1301 courses is rampant, apparent, and beautiful: you know, all that business about entering into discourse communities and such.  An overarching goal is to help my students seek guidance, if not from me then from others.  So, I need to be more cognizant of the moments when this same type of guidance is seeking me out, in my own continued studies of English.  Working on this peer-reviewed journal submission will really help me to breach this doctoral discourse community in a punctual fashion.  I hate being late.

It’s an old-fashioned, an outrageous thing
To believe one has a “destiny”

— a thought often peculiar to those
who possess privilege —

but there is something else:   the faith
of those despised and endangered

that they are not merely the sum
of damages done to them

[Sources (1983)]

No short passage could sum up the vast and various intellectual work of poet/essayist Adrienne Rich, but that short piece from a long poem speaks to two important things about her. She was undeniably privileged, a child of east-coast Establishment ease and Radcliffe education, a Harvard faculty wife by her early 20s, author of tasteful poems that W.H. Auden praised in a pat-on-the-head way for “not telling fibs.” Nobody would have blamed her for hosting Cambridge cocktail parties for the rest of her long life.

Yet the choices she made, in the process of remaking herself personally and professionally again and again, did make her “despised and endangered,” and in no figurative sense. She left the Ivy League and the Seven Sisters behind, taking a teaching job in the radical open-access SEEK program of the City University of New York. She came out as a lesbian. She devoted almost a half-century to speaking out against misogyny, homophobia, racism, militarism, and anti-Semitism. In the process, she forged a kind of free-verse, long-sentence, highly rhetorical poetry that has been hugely influential on American verse. Her poems read like essays and her essays read like poems. All are topical and engagée; she called one of her volumes Leaflets because she saw no essential difference between poems and calls to action.

And, unashamedly, Adrienne Rich believed she had a “destiny”:

When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say: those mountains have a meaning
but further than that I could not say.

To do something very common, in my own way.

["A Valediction Forbidding Mourning," 1971]

Somebody – it’s usually supposed to be Winston Churchill – once said that if you aren’t liberal when young you have no heart; if you aren’t conservative when older, you have no brain. Adrienne Rich, possessed of both, lived that trajectory in reverse. It’s not that her first few volumes of poems are especially reactionary, but they are decorous. Women’s half-lived lives feature in her books from the 1950s. One can imagine a poet retreating into half-silence after writing them, or flowering into madness (like Rich’s contemporaries Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton). Rich instead did “very common” practical things, addressing what needed addressing with directness and sanity.

And as Rich aged, she just got more progressive. All her obituaries cite her 1997 refusal of a National Medal of Arts, when she wrote President Clinton that “the very meaning of art as I understand it is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration.” That’s the Clinton administration, mind you, the one so many progressives now look back on with nostalgia – the administration that Maya Angelou, no closet conservative, had memorably ushered in. But in Rich’s eyes, Clinton failed to pass a healthcare bill, dismantled welfare programs, capitulated on “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” waged drone wars against ill-specified enemies, and made a mess of the Kyoto environmental accords. In fact, one could argue that one of the Clinton Administration’s most progressive positions was its determination to honor Adrienne Rich. She wouldn’t help them out.

Many of Rich’s poems read like essays, I’ve said, and her essays are probably the most vital part of her literary legacy. In “When We Dead Awaken” (1971), she argued that

“Political” poetry by men remains stranded amid the struggles for power among male groups . . . The mood of isolation, self-pity, and self-imitation that pervades “nonpolitical” poetry suggests that a profound change in masculine consciousness will have to precede any new male poetic—or other—inspiration. The creative energy of patriarchy is fast running out; what remains is its self-generating energy for destruction. As women, we have our work cut out for us.

Forty years ago, poetry was seen by academic critics almost entirely in aestheticist terms. If it is now seen almost entirely in rhetorical and political terms, we owe that more to Adrienne Rich than to any other single critic.

When it comes to what you put into your skull, what kind of Sherlockian are you?

In A Study in Scarlet, the first of Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales about the detective and his loyal sidekick, Dr. Watson is trying to figure out just what kind of roommate he has picked up while recuperating from his recent military service overseas. (“You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” Holmes famously remarks upon being introduced, in an exchange that is gently parodied in the 1986 Disney movie The Great Mouse Detective.) While studying Holmes’s eclectic intellectual pursuits in hopes of enlightenment, Watson is stunned when his acquaintance not only claims ignorance about the fact that the Earth orbits the sun but then actually expresses his intention of forgetting his new knowledge:

“ ‘You see,’ he explained, ‘I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilled workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones. . . . [Y]ou say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.’ ” (The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Vol. 1, 154)

(In defense of the supposedly astronomically ignorant Holmes, editor William S. Baring-Gould argues that the detective is actually pulling Watson’s leg with his remarks about the solar system.)

The curious thing is that toward the end of his career, Holmes implicitly contradicts his utilitarian position. In “The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane,” he solves the mysterious death of a science instructor by recalling an odd phrase used by a nature writer in describing a jellyfish. “I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles,” Holmes remarks (789). Apparently by this point in his life, the detective has found that extracurricular reading has its rewards.

Academia encourages, and sometimes actually demands, the approach of the younger Holmes. Reading and other mental activities are the servants of scholarship, and if something doesn’t “make a pennyworth of difference” to one’s work as a teacher or academic writer, to the wayside it goes. Detective fiction? Who has time for that when there’s a journal article waiting?

But I’ve always had an instinctive sympathy for the older Holmes – the one who, instead of reading yet another treatise on cigar ashes or the latest lurid testimony from the assizes, decides to kick back with some nature writing that later enables him to deduce that a fatality should be laid at the feet (or rather tentacles) of Cyanea capillata rather than a jealous romantic rival.

Part of this harks back to my longtime vocation as a copy editor, a job in which possessing knowledge that is a mile wide and an inch deep is quite advantageous. (You never know when the difference between the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox Church might be important.) But it’s also a personality thing that reaches back into my youth. When news broke recently that Encyclopaedia Britannica would no longer be publishing a printed edition, I was struck by the number of Facebook acquaintances who confessed that they (like me) had spent their childhood leisure hours leafing through the family encyclopedia, omnivorously snapping up whatever trifles of knowledge they might find there.

Clearly, the sort of single-minded, narrowly focused dedication that Holmes advocates in A Study in Scarlet is necessary to scholarly success. (Commenting on the detective’s familiarity with what we would call true-crime literature, Watson bemusedly notes, “He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century” [156]). But I would argue that the broad approach has its rewards as well. (In fact, some of these thoughts, along with the Sherlock Holmes references, formed part of one of my first graduate school papers in the summer of 2009.) One of our most important abilities is that of making connections between ideas, and the wider the intellectual net has been cast – inside and outside one’s specific academic focus – the more connections can be made, to the benefit of students as well as fellow scholars.

Perhaps I am preaching to the academic choir; perhaps we all know the importance of occasionally purchasing the oddball intellectual tool on the off chance that it may prove handy someday. But if not, consider the possible value of having one corner of that rigorously ordered mental attic dedicated to a little creative chaos. The younger Sherlock Holmes might raise an acerbic eyebrow, but the older one might look up from his retirement beekeeping and give you an approving nod.

Every night I jam an aluminum folding chair against the front door of my apartment. It gives me piece of mind that, if all the imaginary burglars, murderers, and rapists do come to get me, either they will be unable to enter or the resultant clanging of the chair as they burst through the door will buy me a few extra seconds to … call for help? make sure I’m wearing my cute PJ’s? tap into my undiscovered ass-kicking ninja skills? Honestly, I’ve never thought through this scenario very carefully. But still, every night, in order to ensure a restful night’s sleep, I set up my very high-tech and well-thought-out security system. What does this have to do with “meta-professional” matters in the English department? Such defenses against imaginary criminals lead me to think about how I cope with anxiety, including that which comes from my position as both an English graduate student and as a GTA. It also brings to mind another imaginary group of bogeymen that my folding chair seems ultimately powerless to stop: the fraud police.

When speaking at the New England Institute of Art’s commencement on April 23, 2011, Amanda Palmer talked at length about a group of people she calls the fraud police:

The fraud police are this imaginary, terrifying force of experts and real grown-ups who don’t exist and who come knocking on your door at 3am, when you least expect it, saying, “Fraud police. We’ve been watching you and we have evidence that you have no idea what you are doing. And you stand accused of the crime of completely making shit up as you go along. You do not actually deserve your job and we’re taking everything away. And we are telling everybody.”

Even though Palmer was talking to a room full of arts majors, not English graduate students, I think the basic concept still applies. The fraud police have haunted and harassed me off and on ever since I first started graduate school in Summer 2009, although I hadn’t come to identify them by that name yet.

But, if I am to believe Calvin Thomas’s article “Moments of Productive Bafflement, or Defamiliarizing Graduate Studies in English,” it’s not necessarily the worst thing in the world if I don’t know what I’m doing. By insisting that “you must not know what you are doing, it is imperative that you not know what you are doing, that you never know what you are doing, or else you will never do it well” (20), Thomas gives graduate students a seemingly counterintuitive message that is oddly one of the more comforting messages I’ve heard in the last 2 ½ years. If only he hadn’t followed that insight with this gem: “if you are even capable of imagining doing something else, doing anything else, you probably shouldn’t be doing graduate studies in English” (20). Maybe it’s just me, but I have a rather vivid imagination and can imagine myself working any number of different jobs. In fact, this irritating fault of my imagination features prominently when the fraud police come knocking at my door asking, “Why did you pick English? You do know that you are pretty good at that math and science stuff.” But despite the vivid imagination and the possibility of other vague career opportunities, I keep finding myself coming back to English, first for a Master’s degree, now for my PhD. This leads me to believe that on some level, if I wasn’t cut out for this, I would’ve bailed already. Every time I bemoan grading 48 essays or spend the weekend working two twelve-hour days to catch up on coursework, I realize that I don’t actually mind that much, that I possess that kind of masochistic streak Thomas argues might be necessary to do this kind of work. However, this moment of clarity is only a brief stop in the seemingly continuous cycle of doubt. The fraud police do keep to a schedule, you know.

Confrontations with the fraud police can become immensely more complicated in the case of GTAs where the concerns and anxieties of student and teacher converge. For my part, I was thrown into teaching composition with what felt like very little preparation; I have been “guilty of the crime of completely making shit up” so many times I’ve lost count. And, while this has largely turned out OK, I have wondered how it affects my students. In a recent issue of CCC, Dylan B. Dryer reports on a study he did of novice GTAs and how those GTAs “expressed considerable anxiety about—and frequent hostility toward—academic writing conventions and then projected disconcertingly reductive versions of these anxieties and writing practices onto students” (421). Dryer rightly points out the conundrum many GTAs face as “find their writing confidence and competence undermined in one set of classrooms and faculty offices while being positioned (and positioning themselves) as writing experts in another set of classrooms and in their own offices” (425). As a graduate student, I constantly question everything I know and frequently feel as though my brain is threatening mutiny.

But three days a week, I have to try to set that aside and become an authority (of sorts) about writing for my students. I’m not that good an actor, and I hate being disingenuous with them, so I’m sure my students pick up on this incongruity. In fact, I know they do because I talk about my experience writing each of the ENGL 1301 essays and I am all too happy to agree with students when they independently voice the exact same problems with the essays that I experienced. In proposing a possible course of action to solve this problem, Dryer argues that GTAs should be trained to make “more constructive use of the dissonance” they experience in the dual role of teacher and student and the kinds of selves or identities that are produced in those roles (421).  Obviously I can’t tell my students, “You’re right, this essay sucks. Don’t write it.” Instead, I try to use myself as a model, not an authority, on how to deal with the hostility towards or misgivings about academic writing conventions.

At the end of her speech on the fraud police, Palmer assures the new graduates that “You will get to a point where the fraud police will come knocking. And you will open the door. And when they accuse you of being a fraud, you will honestly be able to say, ‘You’re right. I still have no idea what I’m actually doing. I am making this shit up as I go along, but it is working out just fine.’” Making productive use of dissonance doesn’t mean hiding from the fraud police or making them go away entirely. It means acknowledging and embracing the anxiety and uncertainty as a productive force, thereby lessening its detrimental impact. It also means implementing strategies that are the equivalent of my aluminum folding chair in that, while they do serve a certain practical function, they are mainly there for reassurance that everything will work out just fine.

Albuquerque. Downtown Hyatt Regency. Thirteenth floor. Friday, mid-morning. Vacuum in background. Elevator bell down the hall. Door handle of 1306 blinks green twice. Door opens. Light creeps beyond the barrier of thick curtains. Message indicator blinks red on phone. Debris covers the bed.

This is not, unfortunately, a scene from Breaking Bad. Walter White is not holding the room key, Jesse Pinkman is not eating Funions on the bed, and Gus Fring is not waiting on the end of the telephone line. Instead, I am the one opening the door in New Mexico three weeks ago. I am there to present a paper, not manufacture narcotics, and my 24 hours in Albuquerque are about as far from the television show as you can imagine (minus the fried chicken).

The city played host to the 33rd annual meeting of the Southwest Texas PCA/ACA Conference. I arrived towards the end, on a Friday morning, because I had class (as teacher and as student) the day before. I got to the hotel in-between sessions, and luckily they let me check into my room early. After dropping my bags off, I went through my normal routine: 1) Check-in at the registration table, where I receive the brightly-colored monogrammed tote bag (this one was orange) and politely accept my complimentary coffee mug/travel thermos/paperweight/etc; 2) Make my way past the book displays, where I find the perfect distance between the wall and the table where I can see the titles to the books while still looking just disinterested enough for the sellers to leave me be; 3) Check out the snack machines/hotel amenities; and 4) Return to my room to assess my television options for my stay.

Back in the room I spend some time grading Reading Responses for my 1302 class and scout my options for lunch. I also browse through the conference program (this time it’s on a flash-drive rather than paper) and try and figure out which session(s) I will try and make it to that afternoon. I find a couple that sound interesting and make my way to the free lunch in the Grand Pavilion. After lunch I grade a few more Reading Responses and then head to Session 3076: “Sports 1: Mediasport” in Grand Pavilion IV. Here are the titles of the papers: “American Sports Stories: from the Weight Room to the Classroom”; “Sports in the Twitter Age”; and “Drinkin and Drivin: The Complicated Relationship between NASCAR and Alcohol.” I show up a few minutes early–to get a prime seat, of course–and the session begins a few minutes late. Grand total attendance: 4. This includes the presenters. One of the presenters has apparently had to cancel, so the panel and crowd are equal at 2 apiece. In a crowded session, the pressure is on the presenter. In “Sports 1: Mediasport,” the pressure was on the audience. I have never listened so closely to a presentation or tried harder to think of something interesting to say. My fellow audience-member and I–after moving up a few rows once we realized it was just us–were able to perform quite well, and by the end of the session there had actually been some rather interesting and productive conversations. I learned a few things and was able to provide some helpful feedback. I went back to my room with that good, academically-productive feeling.

My session was the next morning: “Cormac McCarthy I” in Sendero Ballroom III. The titles: “Lester Ballard and His Discontents: Understanding Cormac McCarthy’s Grotesque Hero through Freud” (this was mine); “No Country for Lawyers: Cormac McCarthy’s Legal Landscapes”; and “Post 9/11 and Post 2008: How to Read Cormac McCarthy and the American Dream.” Luckily my session had a much bigger crowd than “Sport 1: Mediasport” (probably 10-15, thanks to McCarthy’s popularity), and things went well. My fellow presenters were well-read and intelligent, and their papers inspired some great conversations. I also received some interesting questions and comments from the crowd, and after staying for “Cormac McCarthy II,” I again left with that good ol’ feeling of productivity.

This was my fifth or sixth conference experience, and they have all been unique in certain ways, while also strangely similar. And while the good feelings I get from presenting my work are important, I find myself with some questions about the conference system. I remember at one conference (I think it was the College English Association National Conference in San Antonio) being told rather stringently while standing at the registration table to do one thing: attend sessions. This was not a “I hope you enjoy your time at CEA” type of message; this was an “If you don’t attend sessions you are committing academic sin and are not here for the right reasons” message. And after going to more and more, I understand this push: how many sessions are like “Sport I: Mediasport”? How many presenters find themselves reading their work to one or two people, including their fellow presenters? What can be done about this? Is this, in fact, a problem? Where are all of the conference-goers if not attending the actual conference? Seeing the town (which seems a stretch considering some of the destinations)? Chatting with friends? Watching Breaking Bad in their hotel rooms? Maybe I’m just going to the wrong conferences.

I personally have experienced this audience-void before, and I remember being unsure about how I felt. On one hand, who cared how many people heard me? I still got to put it on my CV, and I still had the opportunity to present my work to a couple of people that seemed genuinely interested. On the other hand, what’s the point of reading my work if noone is listening? I always tell my students to join the larger conversation when they make an argument, because without that they have no reason to speak. If noone else wants to hear about Larry McMurty and small-town Texas, or Paul Auster and epistemology (two previous papers I presented to rather minimal crowds), then what purpose am I serving? Why pay for the hotel room, flight, rental car, registration, food, etc.? Is it worth the line on my CV?

Yes, it’s worth it. At least for me it is. I think that as English Department people we have already accepted the fact that not many people are going to be in the audience whenever we speak. We know that most people don’t care about what we care about, and most people aren’t interested in what we are interested in (At least that’s how I feel around most of my family, friends, neighbors, etc.) But we don’t write our papers and give our talks because most people want to hear them; we do these things for the few that do. We do it because the conversations that take place between 4 people in “Sport I: Mediasport” are, for us, valuable and worthwhile.

So I will continue to go to my one conference a year and read my paper to a small crowd of fellow _______-lovers (fill in the blank with whatever author, book, tv show, genre, etc. that you are interested in). And I will continue to explain to my roommates: Yes, I do actually fly across the country to listen to people I don’t know read papers I didn’t write about books I haven’t read. And I will continue to go to sessions like “Sport I: Mediasport,” “Southern Literature III: Flannery O’Connor,” and “Grateful Dead 13: Presenting the Dead, Historically and Artifactually”; not because it’s as exciting as watching Breaking Bad, because it’s certainly not; not because of the free monogrammed tote bags, which are slowly filling up my closet space; and not because I look forward to being another day or two behind my schoolwork; but because I believe it is worthwhile. If I didn’t, then why would I be doing what I’m doing with my life?

Of course, the CV line doesn’t hurt either.