December 2009

I wish I had mentioned in my second presentation that I was offered thirty minutes to speak, since our second speaker did not show up. I took the whole thirty, too. (I had written 23 minutes, but then I added stuff.)

I wonder how many people in the audience were thinking, “Well, it’s a good thing the other person didn’t show.”

And I wish I had gotten the source for 1 in 4 women will be assaulted in their lifetime. If I had looked it up again, I would have found that now the National Institute for Justice and the CDC say that it is 1 in 6. That’s a useful statistic and then I would have had a citation for the person who wanted one. Unfortunately I don’t know her name. Maybe she’ll come visit TCE? Or email me? She took a draft of the paper home with her and it had my email address.

The CDC gives a citation for their 1 in 6 number:

Tjaden P, Thoennes N. Extent, nature, and consequences of intimate partner violence: findings from the National Violence Against Women Survey. Washington (DC): Department of Justice (US); 2000. Publication No.: NCJ 181867. Available from: URL: www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/pubs-sum/
181867.htm.

I asked for a copy of a paper to use in my teaching of Beowulf, telling the presenter that I thought it would add useful background information to my discussion of the text.

The grad student who wrote it was apparently hesitant about giving out the paper, even though I said I wouldn’t print it or copy it, but would only use it in my class.

She finally said, “I guess I’d be okay with you using it in teaching.”

What’s that all about?

A chair of a search committee for English writes about what should be in the portfolio.

A reader should have the answers to these three basic questions after reading your teaching portfolio. Ideally, they’ll be addressed toward the beginning:

1.How long has this person been teaching?
2.How many (and which) courses has this person taught?
3.How many (and what kinds of) student populations has this person taught?

Then she goes on to give a list of materials that should be included.

I have been to four presentations today and have two more to go to. I skipped the 5 pm one because I hadn’t eaten anything since 9 am and I had a low blood sugar headache and was nauseous. (Yes, TMI.)

The presentations today were more problematic than yesterday’s. One set everyone read. This is the reading I think people get upset with. They read papers which were written to be articles, not written to be presentations. They weren’t easy to follow nor light enough to enjoy anyway. One took double her alloted time. Another set, two read (as above) and one went over by ten minutes. The third set one speaker wasn’t there. They didn’t go over and there were lots of good questions. Somewhere between 30 and 40 people were there. (That was mine.) The fourth one was good, too.

I am going to two more this evening.

I haven’t been to the book exhibit and I’m not going to make it there, either. I guess that’s good for my pocketbook. Bad for my idea-generator (brain), but good for the economic end.

I haven’t hit the cash bars and eating in the room has kept my costs down.

I am glad I came.

My flight arrived at 11:15 on Monday. After taking the train into town, I walked around trying to understand where everything is.

I went to meetings that started in the hours of 1, 3, 5, and 7, with a short run back to my hotel to eat instant oatmeal so I could stay awake.

Heard some good talks. In fact, I haven’t heard anything that wasn’t well done. NEH should have held questions till the end, but that’s a failing newbie conference goers make.

Early modern women’s manuscripts was on FIRE. Made me want to go read a miscellanie or devotional book right now and write about it tomorrow. First of all, Susan Felcher raised the bar on handouts to the ceiling. Unless you brought in gold bars or original books, she beat you. We got color photographs and scrolls! She gave me a copy of her paper and I will be reading it and her book and commenting on those. (Come back for more later.) Jamie Goodrich was fascinating in explaining why all the experts are wrong. And I believe her. (And you should ask her why Google is your friend. Prepare to be amazed.) And Michelle DiMeo was excellent in her argument on the same topic, but for a different author. I believe her too. This stuff was incredible.

The Scottish playwright Liz Lochead was a blast. I want to purchase her drama Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off. (Didn’t yall do jump rope to that?) I vaguely remember that. I was not the jump rope queen. I also want to find her dual language poem in Scots and English for nine year olds. Amazing phrasing.

Kidspoem/Bairnsang
“it wis January / and a gey dreich day / the first day Ah went to the school” This poem in Scots and English by Liz Lochhead appears in the most recent collection of her poems: The Colour of Black & White: poems 1984-2003 (Polygon, 2003), and in The Smoky Smirr o Rain: a Scots Anthology (Itchy Coo, 2003).

So says The Scottish Poetry Library.

Finally I heard the Old English panel.

Thomas D. Hill of Cornell argued for the gwyrda being a staff of power, as opposed to a cross or a rune stick. I think his argument makes a lot of sense.

Thomas Bredehoft did an interesting take on the Frank’s Casket. While I don’t totally believe him, I think he is on to something.

Robert Epstein had an interesting discussion on gifts and commodities, especially as those impact the exchange of Hildeburh in Beowulf. I think he made an interesting point, but perhaps did not go far enough. The naysayer in the crowd thinks he had no point. And one person was wondering if his point didn’t make things worse for women. … But what no one said is that Hildeburh had agency for herself and for her peoples. She could command her son be laid on her brother’s funeral pier. In her, and in her son, were mixed the two peoples. She could mix them again in death. That’s some pretty powerful agency.

Absolutely everything was great.

The only problem is I am giving a talk tomorrow and it is not that astounding. I think I make some good points, but they are nothing new. They don’t stand the scholarship on its head like all the early modern women’s manuscript papers. They don’t offer a totally new interpretation like the Thomases in OE. They aren’t hysterically riveting like Liz Lochead’s work… All I do is offer four tested measures for getting students to talk to each other across the wall of generations. But, I guess, if you are a teacher and you want some practical advise, coming to my talk tomorrow will give it to you.

I personally feel that my presentation on Wednesday is ground breaking and riveting. I guess we’ll find out on Wednesday.

Heather Ostman’s presentation will be phenomenal too.

I will identify areas for faculty development as well as possible assessment policy changes in community college writing program administration to make broader points about emotional intelligence and consciousness of hierarchical relationships within the academic setting.

Yall should come hear us.

Laura E. Tanner’s article, for The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States on Rape, says:

The project of tracing the thematic appearance of rape in American women’s writing is complicated by cultural constraints that have discouraged women from articulating the threat of sexual violence, and by representational limitations that make it difficult to capture the experience of rape in words. The rapes that do appear in early American women’s writing are seldom named as such.

Exactly. People don’t recognize non-explicit rape scenes within literature, earlier or now, because they are partially hidden. It’s like the man in the Santa suit. If you ask someone who he is, the person will say “Santa Claus.” It isn’t really Santa in the suit, but that’s who it looks like.

She does use one phrase which I dislike “most interesting representations of rape,” but if one looks at them in terms of analysis, I guess they could be interesting. I would, I think, prefer the term “most useful.”

As part of my ongoing work on the silences of sexual assault survivors, I have been looking for works which delineate rapes within their narratives.

Law and the Humanities Website offers a bibliography that is particularly useful for this aspect of my work. Representations of Rape in Popular Culture is primarily a list of academic works which deal with rapes in other sources, such as prime-time television or medieval poetry.

I thought that the Christmas holidays would be a time to relax and take stock. I did manage a post of plans, but I don’t have a lot of time off.

First, there was a week after the finals were in and graded. That was a blessing. I actually read about twenty books, for fun, and wrote a chapter for a book.

Then four days of traveling to Arkansas.

We got home tonight and then tomorrow I am leaving for the airport at 5 a.m. to get to MLA a bit late.

I’ll be there till Thursday afternoon when I am flying home. I’ll be home for three days.

Then I’ll be caring for my parents for five days. (My father had a stroke and my mother is in radiation for breast cancer.)

After that, there’s a weekend and school starts.

The BAD news is that I haven’t finished creating the online course that I have to have up and running. I really thought the holidays would be less busy. Silly me.

The good news is that I got the chapter for the book done, I was able to visit my in-laws, and I somewhat feel like myself again after some pretty intense reading for fun.

Just as ProfHacker recommended an End of Semester Checklist, I always feel better if I look forward into the year to see what I will be doing.

For the first time in a long time, I know exactly what I will be doing academically.

Teaching
At the SLAC I will teach two business writing classes and two classes on writing in the social sciences in the spring. All those are for the English department. In the summer I will teach a business writing class for the business school. In the fall I will teach two business writing classes for the business school and two writing in the social science classes for the English department.

At the CC I will teach two freshman composition courses in the spring and fall. One of each will be online. In the miniterm in May, I will teach an Early British Literature course.

Conferences
I will be at Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Southwest Texas in February.

In March I will present on the rhetoric of sexual assault at the Conference for College Teachers of English in Texas.

I will also read my poetry at the Texas College English Association conference.

Finally in March I will present at the national College English Association on the rhetoric of sexual assault in popular speculative fiction.

In early May I will be presenting at Kalamazoo on Judith.

In late May I will be presenting at Computers & Writing on three refinements to course strategies folks are already using.

In June/July I will be heading to Lausanne for the International Hemingway conference.

In October I will be at the South Central MLA. I’ll at least be there as the secretary for Tech Writing. And I hope to be presenting as well.

I would like to do the Conference on Christianity and Literature, also in October.

And, finally for October, I’d like to do the Texas Medieval Association conference. I’ll need to come up with a better presentation this year, though.

Writing
For this, I don’t have a lot of plans. Obviously I’ll need to write the conference papers I haven’t yet.

I’d like to do a chapter for Romance Fiction and American Culture. However, I am not sure how much time I will have to work on that and/or exactly what I would submit, though I have notes on a couple of different directions.

I want to send something to SMART. Probably something based on my Kalamazoo talk.

I would also like to publish a revision of my conference presentations on religion in speculative fiction.

I would like to get my silence paper published, which I once again did not manage last year. That was totally my fault as I did not have time to do all the changes they wanted and write my book. I’m sad about it, but…

I would like another contract on a book. Of course, I do have plans for this summer; last summer I only had my book to work on.

So
I guess I need to work more on my writing section. The other is fairly well planned out.