Long, good day

17 June 2025: 

Things I did today: slept in a tiny bit because I slept awful the night before, mowed the lawn, had lunch with Tim and two recent graduates, helped do a bit of advising for the last group of entering first-year students, did some planning for next semester with Tim (we are taking our students to the Poe House), did some research work, hosted trivia, played with BabyCat and the laser pointer (a promise I made to her yesterday), and listened to a heck of a thunderstorm roll through (with Jo hiding under my chair). 

Not the most exciting post, but I kind of like days like this. 

"A Descent into the Maelström"

23 March 2022: "'No one ever will know what my feelings were at that moment.'" --The "old" man in Poe's "A Descent into the Maelström"

I was so pleased with my seminar's discussion of Poe's story today--one of those wonderful cases where the students' response to a text makes me like it more. 

In my preparation for the class, I was struck by the line above, particularly the idea that he is telling the story and has a captive audience (both in the story and actual readers) yet he knows he will not be able to describe what he has experienced. The tale that cannot be fully told. The message that can not be fully conveyed. And, at times, that only makes reader and teller want to try harder or at least hear/say more. 

And one of our program's super-stars kind of floored me with her idea that the story-within-a-story doesn't come back around (we end in the 'inner' story) because the inner story takes over, sweeping the frame into it...like the Maleström. 

Needless to say, once again, the best part of the day was teaching this class--and the 204 class this morning (when we talked about Pound). 

Spring Break grading laugh...

15 March 2022: Working through two kind of ambitious (and boring and slightly depressing) Spring Break to-do lists. (Yes: there are two lists.) But making steady progress. And I found myself laughing out loud at this phrase from a paper by one of my seminar students: "intelligent ladies using occult knowledge to outwit death." "Sounds like a cool club," I wrote in my comments. 

"The Masque of the Red Death"

4 February 2022: It's a heck of a thing to teach Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" in 2022. Another reminder of the stunning relevance of so much great American literature. And these students get it and see all of the connections, especially between Prince Prospero and the former president. (I didn't have to say it--they knew it.) 

"The Man of the Crowd"

31 January 2022: Had a pretty wonderful time discussing Poe's "The Man of the Crowd" with my seminar this afternoon. Though I tried not to show it too much, I also found myself quite moved thinking about his epigraph: "Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul," translated as "This great misfortune, of not being able to be alone." 

For the titular man of the crowd, the narrator supposes some great crime keeps him from being able to be alone. But I raised the idea more generally, offering that I could understand the kind of unease or distress that we might feel when alone, something we try to chase away by being around others. I didn't want to overshare or show how deeply I feel this at times, especially lately, but it was clear that others could see the point I was making. Just one of those moments where we can feel the point a writer makes stretching across time. (Similar moments in ENGL 204 today, as we discussed "The Birthmark" and "The Minister's Black Veil.") 

So far, the seminar is going quite well, more a tribute to the students than to me. 

Partial credit?

24 January 2022: "Would you accept 'a shoe stepping on a lizard?'" --one of my students today, trying to get partial quiz credit for a quiz question about Montresor's coat of arms in "The Cask of Amontillado."

Why is that so funny? Sometimes it's hard to say why, but we laughed ourselves silly for a bit. And a good class overall. 

When my mind is on other things, the two hours in the classroom today were just the sweetest and best. Also helping: the women's basketball game this evening. (They won.)

Poe cakes!

19 January 2022: My job is pretty sweet every day, but some days that works on multiple levels. One of my students make these two beautiful and delicious cakes to mark Poe's birthday today.

Course prep help...

4 January 2022: I think often about how lucky I am to have a friend like Hannah. Not sure how I would have gotten through this pandemic and everything else without her. 

Here's one more example of her awesomeness: today when she had a bit of time free at work and her boss was away from her desk, she invited me over to help me talk out some questions I had about my seminar. That was her way of "rebelling" a bit at work. The conversation was so good and helpful--she's (at heart) such a wonderful teacher. And I am pretty sure she had fun. What a gift she is. 

And that syllabus and all the other course prep stuff? Just about done!

Burst of progress...

3 January 2022: Had a huge burst of progress today with my Poe seminar syllabus. I last taught this class in 2010--and on a TR schedule--so I didn't want to just do what I did last time. Plus, I've grown and learned some things about teaching since then. Anyway, still some more pieces to hammer out, but if all goes as planned, I might finish that "Winter Break To-Do List" in the next couple of days. 

Started the day, by the way, with an on-campus rapid COVID test, a requirement of everyone when they return to campus. (I kind of never left. Ha.) Negative, thank goodness. (Also took one on the morning Hannah and I painted...) Something about seeing all these Shepherd folks (staff, mostly) coming together to run this big operation gets to me, just like it always does. I want to cry, it's so lovely. This is a very special place. 

"not in the insane, murderous ways..."

11 December 2019: Favorite excerpt from a final exam (so far) this semester, this one on the narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart”:

“I relate to this character in many ways; not in the insane, murderous ways, but in his attitude and mannerisms. He set a goal for himself and strove to achieve it with patience and determination. Moreover, he is anxious, but tries to make himself appear calm, much like myself during finals week.”

Fingers crossed...

I've been a bad blogger lately. Same old excuse...busy, busy, busy.

Anyway, I just sent off the Poe article again (after receiving a revise and resubmit last spring). Feels good to have it out of my hands, but (as always!) hitting that "send" button is just so scary!

The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe

Revising my essay on “The Black Cat” has led me to Scott Peeples’ The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe, a book that I read from cover to cover yesterday. (It’s that good and that well-written.) Basically, it’s a survey of Poe’s “afterlives,” or, as Peeples puts it, “a description of the most influential and widely debated ways of seeing Poe, a general survey of Poe studies from Griswold’s obituary to the year 2002.” Embracing the most academic of treatments to the campiest of horror films, Peeples’ study is a terrific trip through how Poe has been read and interpreted.

Here’s a good sampler, a fantastic quotation from a 1930 Aldous Huxley piece: “‘The substance of Poe is refined; it is his form that is vulgar. He is, as it were, one of Nature’s Gentlemen, unhappily cursed with incorrigible bad taste. To the most sensitive and high-souled man in the world we should find it hard to forgive, shall we say, the wearing of a diamond ring on every finger. Poe does the equivalent of this in his poetry; we notice the solicism and shudder….It is when Poe tries to make it too poetical that his poetry takes on its peculiar tinge of badness’” (qtd. in Peeples 64). (There’s a wicked little parody of Huxley doing Poe doing Paradise Lost, too.)

Anyway, a couple of pages later, Peeples adds, “Poe does wear his rings on every finger, which may be why Homer and Bart Simpson are among the most successful interpreter of his most famous poem” (66). That’s just good stuff.

Work Cited

Peeples, Scott. The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004.  

Poe Toaster still missing...

Seems like he's really gone. Kind of sad.

Off it goes!

Major box checked off on the "Summer To-Do List."

I just emailed a copy of the Poe article to a journal (who shall, at this point, remain nameless) and will later drop two paper copies in the regular mail. I've done this a number of times before, but that actual moment of sending the email or mailing the package still terrifies me. I always take a deep breath, say a quick prayer, and then let go. Gulp.

Cross your fingers, say some prayers, etc.


(This picture is from April or so. It's a pretty good encapsulation of the "Year of Poe" in my professional life. From the presentation at the Faculty Research Forum in November to the Poe Seminar in the spring semester to the final push (for now) on this article, it's been a whole lotta Edgar. And, as I write about in the paper, Wes and Bing have been a part of it all. They were, in fact, the inspiration for the paper.)

How I've been spending this Saturday...

In my office on campus, editing, editing, editing...

And now, converting my freshly-edited article from MLA to Chicago style. Three and a half pages done out of 19. Fun stuff. I need a break.

Technological difficulties

I am doing my best to finally get this darn Poe article done and sent out for review. Lately, though, it seems that the universe (or at least the technological universe) is conspiring against me. First, my most recent, heavily revised version of the file simply vanished from every place I thought I had saved it. I suspect that this was actually my fault, that in an effort to copy the folder with the article and all my notes from my university network drive to my flash drive, I actually did the opposite--copied from flash drive to network drive and somehow deleted the article.

Major crisis, right? Well, it was, but thankfully, I had a print-out version, which my awesome friend David passed on to my awesome friend Aaron, who scanned it for me and emailed it to me yesterday. Yay! I shudder to think of the labor I would have had if that print-out had not existed...I still have my scribbled on, earlier drafts, but they are a mess. Plus, what makes it to the next draft is never an exact replication of those scribbled annotations, etc. So yeah, David and Aaron are awesome.

Next step: clean up the scanned version. As you might know, when you convert a pdf to a Word document, things get slightly messed up. Characters get switched, certain formatting gets lost, etc. Fixing the errors is a time-consuming process, but obviously less time-consuming than having to retype the whole thing. Plus, it makes you re-read everything again--and closely--which is always a good thing at this stage of composition.

Yesterday, after the end of Day 2 of Session 2 of Freshman Advising and Registration (more about that later, maybe), I spent about an hour cleaning up the document. It was actually kind of fun work. Yes, this is because, neat-freak that I am, I even enjoying cleaning documents. Plus, it was cool to see the progress in front of my eyes. Then the student I was doing an independent study with showed up, so I had to stop for awhile. She actually showed up about 15 minutes early, so I saved my work on the network drive, and only the network drive. This is okay (theoretically) since the network drive is super-secure and backed up every night, etc.

When an hour had passed and the independent study meeting was over, I turned back to the computer, which was displaying some pop-up messages about "network connections" being lost, etc. No big deal--this happens, then things get fixed. The document was still on my screen so I thought, "just in case, I'll save a copy on my desktop," but then Word crashed (don't know why) and that didn't work. And when I restarted my computer, the network drive was unavailable. Email wasn't working either. I eventually went home, where my Shepherd email was working (in web form) and there was an from IT explaining that there were all kinds of server problems, etc. "No big deal," I told myself, because I know that document is okay--just sitting on the network drive waiting for me to get back to it.

But now it's almost 11:00 on Friday and the network is still inaccessible. So much for getting those revisions done today. Very frustrating.

End of my technological venting session.

Links, links, and more links...

It's the calm before the storm here, so to speak. Post-wedding, pre-grading onslaught. Yes, there are still dozens of tasks to get through today, but I really want to share some links that have been collecting in my bookmarks for a couple of weeks now.

First, the academic links beginning with the serious and ending with the downright funny:

1) Another great column from Libby Gruner, someone I met and admired in my brief time at the University of Richmond, at insiderhighered.com. This one takes on rubrics, spreadsheets, and the changing nature of being an English professor.

2) A nice little piece about keeping a notebook from insidehighered.com.

3) "Five Ways the Google Books Settlement Will Change the Future of Reading." Google Books has already changed the way I do research, so this article was especially interesting to me. A brief example: back in 2004/2005, when I was working on my dissertation, there was an childrens' book by Mary Mann that would have liked to get my hands on. Yes, I could have requested it via ILL, but it would have come in microfilm and that point in my process, I just didn't want to have another "must read on a small screen in the library" book to get through, especially for what would probably translate into a mere paragraph or footnote in my dissertation. So, I didn't get it. A few months ago, though, I was able to view and print the whole darn thing, thanks to Google Books. For people like me, interested in 19th-century and earlier texts, Google Books is amazing. I've also used it to print out big chunks of periodicals, for instance, to illustrate for my Seminar students the contexts in which some of Poe's stories appeared.

4) The field of English studies has been saved by "Neuro Lit Crit." Thank goodness. Some doubts and reactions here.

5) So a professor in California runs a website with advice for picking up hookers in Thailand. I don't see a problem here. (Actually, it's kind of an interesting piece in terms of how you handle abhorrent personal behavior that doesn't technically affect someone's work on campus.)

6) [Veering towards the funny/irreverent here.] "20 Percent of Librarians Have Done It in the Stacks." Isn't that the entire reason for working in the library? This also makes me think about my librarian friends in new ways...

7) "A Princeton Professor Dissects Ke$ha's 'Tic Tok.'" Absurdly wonderful.

No more Poe Toaster?

Check this out!

"The Black Cat" Presentation...

If you are wondering what the image below could possibly have to do with Poe's "The Black Cat," you'll have to come to my presentation tomorrow.



Special thanks to David, who knew how I could get that image off of my cellphone and onto my computer. He's my tech go-to guy.

Poe links

Last weekend found me in Atlanta for SAMLA (which went very well--a picture or two will follow in a subsequent post). Now that that's done, I can move onto the next item on my busy semester's to-do list: getting ready for my presentation at the Faculty Research Forum on November 18 (in one week!). The subject: that "The Black Cat" paper I've been kicking around in various forms for quite awhile.

Now the paper itself is done--has been for a very long time, but I need to make it a bit longer and want to make it more general-audience friendly (in other words, not just for a bunch of English PhDs). Plus, I've got a to make a powerpoint presentation, something I am not very good at doing. It's the aesthetics of the thing that always trip me up--mine never look as sleek or polished as I want them to look.

Anyway, I've got Poe on the brain, so figured I'd link to a couple of recent "Poe in the News" sites. Incidentally, I think I'll reference both of the stories in the beginning of my talk, since they speak to people's continuing fascination with Poe.

1) "Edgar Allan Poe Finally Getting Proper Burial." I found this one all sorts of creepy--and totally appropriate for Poe.

2) "Quoth the Raven: 'Baltimore.'" This recent NPR story discusses an exhibit of works inspired by Poe. Anyone up for a roadtrip to Baltimore to check it out?