Virtual SAMLA

14 November 2020: SAMLA is totally online this year, which is--of course!--very smart and necessary. But it sure is strange. I am sitting here listen to very smart people talk about their work, the typical conference experience. But Wesley sleeps behind me on the chair, the dryer ends its cycle and I fold the laundry. I am wearing gym shorts and no shoes while the robot vacuum whooshes by. 

I deliver my own paper tomorrow morning, but I'll be sure to be on campus (better internet) and dressed professionally--at least from the waist up. 

A panel comes together...

17 June 2014: Tuesday found me finalizing the details for the Hawthorne Society panel at SAMLA this year. One of the panelists is a former student of mine who is about to begin his MA work at Lehigh. He's presenting on a paper he started in my Hawthorne class and then revised more, first for his capstone project, then for his grad school writing sample. Being on a panel with him will be a terrific experience. He makes me proud.

Back to the office...

19 May 2014: After being away for a week, I made it back to the office on Monday and got started on some projects for the summer. It felt good to be back and start checking some items off my to-do list. What I am most thankful for, though, is the enthusiasm I feel for a new project for SAMLA in Atlanta in November. There's a Hawthorne story I've been wanting to write about for awhile and on Monday, I think I found my way in. Yay!

Getting to know you...

The "you" in this post's title refers to my newest adventure in research: a long anticipated project on Fanny Fern that I am only just starting. (It's not that big a project--for now, just a paper for SAMLA in November.) Anyway, as I look towards wrapping up one big project (that MELUS article I mentioned here) and get ready to start writing another conference paper (this one on Constance Fenimore Woolson, for the SSAWW conference in October--and the research/note-taking is done on this one), it seems like the right time to start the Fern project. I will confess, though, to having a lot of it already written in my head.

Major nerd alert, but it's so true: this first phase of research--hitting the MLA bibliography, ordering ILL materials, printing off articles, picking up books, really diving into the conversation--is just always so exciting to me.

Done! (For real!)

Just submitted my last set of grades. I am in a state of semi-disbelief, as they aren't actually due until Monday morning. Go me! Time for a bit of celebratin'. For some reason, this has been my anthem for the week. Not sure why, but I do like the sentiment.

No rest for the weary, though (well, not too much anyway). This weekend, instead of grading, I'll be concentrating on a couple of abstracts for SAMLA.

It won't be all work, though. Saturday is May Day in Shepherdstown and the Opera House is playing Jane Eyre, so I'll do my very best to squeeze in some fun.

And so it goes...

"For My Dog, Who Listens to All My Poems"

I am finally making progress on my SAMLA paper. I'm already thinking of one of the final steps before any conference: the multiple practice readings I'll perform for my always-captive-at-home audience, Bing and Wes. For as long as I've been going to conferences, this has been my ritual: a at least few days before the conference, I'll print out a copy of the paper, set the timer on the microwave, plop down on the kitchen floor and start reading. The oddness of this situation--I don't normally sit on the kitchen floor (and I don't know why I originally picked this location), and I don't often talk uninterrupted for 15-20 minutes to an invisible audience--always draws Bing and Wesley to the scene. They watch, pretty darn captivated, sometimes meowing at me as if to say, "Are you talking to us? 'Cause we're right here..."

So I am reminded of this poem by Cathy Smith Bowers, which Andrew Sullivan recently linked to on his blog.

How entranced, each time, she sits there,
her eyes, I swear,
filling with tears
at her master's

inimitable brilliance. It's
clear to me what's
bounding through her
head: The greatest,

yet, of all the generations!
My husband says
she's just waiting
for her rations.

Bing and Wes aren't quite this earnest (well, Wesley might be while Bing might just indeed be "waiting for his rations"), but God bless 'em, they really do seem to listen with something that looks a heck of a lot like interest and (sometimes) appreciation. Yes, I know that's not really what's going on, but it's awfully nice to imagine that it might be. 

True story...

As I work on  my SAMLA paper, these words seem so very appropriate:

“To participate in the critical discourse on Hawthorne is to step into a fast-rushing stream, crowded with fishermen of varying orientations, all in hot pursuit of a specimen that, no matter how many times it is caught, always ends up back in the water. Thus the sport of Hawthorne criticism has its pleasures and short-lived rewards, but perhaps the most characteristic aspect of the catch has not been its flesh, but its slipperiness, the accompanying sense that the canonical ‘big one’ always gets away. Textually well-supported arguments, often diametrically opposed--we might want to call them studied and elaborate fish stories--are advanced with great regularity, but only seem to incite further discourse. The famously ambiguous Hawthorne has maintained his claim on critical attention by just this capacity of his work to sustain widely disparate readings.”

Seriously. Sometimes I feel like my head is going to explode. 

Citation:

Onderdonk, Todd. “The Marble Mother: Hawthorne’s Iconographies of the Feminine.” Studies in American Fiction 31.1 (2003): 73-100. MLA International Bibliography. Web 26 April 2010.

Oldies but goodies

[Disclaimer: besides actually wanting to write about the subject addressed below, this post is also the result of A) being burned out after a long day and needing a break and B) my need to push that awful tomato worm picture further down the page. Every time I see it, I cringe a bit. Why in the world did I put it up there? And yeah, I know I can take it down, but that seems dishonest or something.]

Okay, so I know I've posted about this topic before (a long time ago), but sometimes I get real satisfaction out of reading old (and sometimes really old) criticism of a work. As I work on this year's SAMLA paper--about Hawthorne's The Marble Faun and Constance Fenimore Woolson's "Miss Grief"--I am working my way through the relevant sections of J. Donald Crowley's Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage. For those outside English studies, these "critical heritage" books are great resources--basically anthologies of criticism/reviews of a major writer's texts. A couple of gems from James Russell Lowell's April 1860 review of The Marble Faun in The Atlantic Monthly:

"Had he been born without the poetic imagination, [Hawthorne] would have written treatises on the Origin of Evil." (This one makes me laugh because it's pretty darn funny and because Hawthorne already kind of does write about the "Origin of Evil.")

One more: "If you had picked up and read a stray leaf of it anywhere, you would have exclaimed, 'Hawthorne!'" I'm not quite sure what I think of The Marble Faun. It's took me two tries to really get into it and even now, it's not what you would call "fun" reading. And in lots of ways, it's very different from Hawthorne's other books. But, like Lowell says, read any page, and there's no denying it's all Hawthorne.

How I've been spending this Sunday...

...up in my office again, this time organizing and copying creative writing submissions for our second Sigma Tau Delta conference.

Up next, re-reading some Hawthorne (for my paper at SAMLA later this year), and after that, maybe some fall syllabizing...

I need a life, but can't find the time.

Fall wrap-up

Now that I am catching my breath, here are some photo highlights (?) from this past semester...

First, there were the conferences...


Vogel and I at SSAWW in Philadelphia in October. This is the one decent photo I have from that conference.


Aaron and David at SAMLA in Atlanta in November. A couple of hotties, right?


Gretchen was at SAMLA, too, and we totally geeked out over her presence at the book displays. The above photo is a blurb she has on the back of this book.


And of course we had to get a photo of her just happening to notice her own book on sale.

Of course, it wasn't all about glamourous conferences and travel this semester. There was also, as I've complained about a lot on this blog, tons of freakin' work to do!


Not everyone was happy about all that work. Here are Bing and Wes doing their best to talk me into taking a break one night. This was in the middle of advising, as evidenced by the spring course schedule and catalog in the picture.


Bing's tactics got increasingly desparate that night. "If she won't stop, I'll just throw myself on the papers and look cute."

Again, it was a long semester!

But there were some fun moments, like the one below, from Allison's Halloween party.


Why yes, that is Little Red Riding Hood, Marie Antoinette, and a poor imitation of the Octomom.

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?

Atlanta

As some of you know, I was in Atlanta last weekend for the South Atlantic Modern Language Association's (SAMLA) conference. I was part of the panel sponsored by the Hawthorne Society, and presented a paper on the pedagogical rewards of teaching Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Scarlett Letter. I won't say too much more about that (unless you actually want to hear more), but I think it went very well. The other papers on the panel were quite interesting, and there was some great discussion afterwards.

The not-so-well kept-secret about conferences, though, is that as much as they are about scholarship and professional development, they are also about having at least some fun. I try to apply to conferences in interesting places and I always try to talk my friends into applying, too. This year I was successful in getting my friend David (from UNCG) to apply and (naturally) his paper was accepted, too. I flew down from WV (actually out of Dulles Airport) and he drove down from Greensboro, bringing our friend (Liz) Vogel with him.

Now you know I wanted to take lots of cool pictures for the blog, right? And I got off to a good start. Here, for instance, are a few from our balcony of our hotel room (we stayed at the Renaissance Atlanta Hotel, where all the conference events took place):


The road you see there is I-85. Gotta love that tacky Olympic torch.


Off to the left of the interstate and the tacky torch, you can see the Georgia Tech campus and football stadium (I think).


And here's the view to the right--lots of big buildings. Yup, that's all I can say about them.

So, you can see that I got off to a good start with my picture-taking, right? But then life (and the conference) intervened. We ended up having to spend most of Saturday inside doing conference stuff (and no, I am not really complaining about this--that's what we were there for, after all). We did go out on Saturday night, but I still haven't mastered using my camera in the dark. (Remember those lighthouse pictures from my trip to Cape Cod?)

I did, however, get some good pictures of my friends while we were doing what tourist do best: eating.


Here are Vogel and David at dinner on Saturday night. We ate at this very cool Chinese restaurant called Mu Lan. It was in this beautiful old Victorian house on Juniper street. My favorite dish? The honey-walnut chicken. Yummy.

Another restaurant we enjoyed was Mick's. We had dinner there on Friday night since we were looking for something on the affordable side. (Remember--some of my friends are still poor graduate students. I know--as if I am rolling in money.) We went back to Mick's for dessert on Saturday night and, perhaps inspired by Amber's food photography, I took some pictures.


My dessert: apple pie ala mode. Yummy. Side story: I was actually in the bathroom when the food arrived, and by the time I returned, the other folks had already tried it and assured me it was "delicious." Can you tell we are a close group?


David ordered this bigger-than-your-head Heath bar pie, and it too, was delicious. Seriously. Take a look at that thing: how can it not be delicious?


Vogel ordered strawberry shortcake, but the waitress dropped it on her way over to the table. By the the time she brought a new one, I forgot to take a picture. You'll just have to settle for this picture of her waiting patiently for her dessert, which was also delicious.


Sugar makes David silly, as evidenced by this picture he took of himself. I post it here only to be mean. I'm like that.

Speaking of restaurants, if you are ever in Atlanta, let me give you another restaurant recommendation: Gladys and Ron's Chicken and Waffles, (owned by Gladys Knight and Ron Winans). We went there for lunch on Saturday and oh my Lord, that was some good food! We meant to go back and take pictures, but didn't get the chance. We also wanted to go back and order the "Midnight Train," four chicken wings and a waffle. Well, maybe next time.

Okay--a couple more pictures:


Vogel and David posing in a English-style phone booth outside a bar.


Me on Saturday night. Not an awful picture, right?