Another

I am here again and today the clouds scrunch up against the sky's dome like they want to snuggle each other. The wind makes me want to make my own wind, so I keep breathing.

Futbol

I have been in a bar working all afternoon, a bar in which the televisions perpetually display football matches--obviously by the title of this post, not of the American variety. Interestingly, I'm not in a faux WASP pub of the American variety, you know the bar in your town, the only place where wayward Brits, Irish, Scots, and Welsh find employment solely on the merits of their accent? This is an American sports bar. We're in one of those lulls--only the NBA and NHL are alive and kicking which means that sports America has gone into hibernation.

Anyway, I think I perhaps have discerned the difference between Americans and other cultures, based on my observance of football (non American). This is not the first non-American football contest I have observed, I must say. In fact, I am very good friends with a formerly non-American football professional. He is now an American, but he still plays football, but he does not play American football. Americans call this soccer. I realize that that sounds stupid, like when white people say, "Well I have Black friends" when they really don't. So, to provide the details: he's Israeli, he works as a trainer, his kids are three and one years old. Yes, I know the guy.

Anyway (x 2), whilst watching this football contest, with the sound superceding conversation (despite this bar's emptiness on a Wednesday afternoon) I'm assaulted by the constant elaborate crowd chants screamed by hooligans tossing their empty beer cups from the stands of football stadium in said football contest. Said chants at least sound complex. They might not be. But they are definitely multi-syllabic. It sounds like 100,000 people are chanting, "Oh, Healthcare, we love you, but you take away our pay, but still it's kinda good to go to the doctor and not get fucked on the bill, wow it's actually a pain and at the same time not so bad to be European." Sometimes they're not European, but the teams playing right now are--or at least I think they are.

The point is, you never hear such mass coordinated utterance from citizens of the United States. You don't even hear that shit from Canada. Is this Americans' problem? Is it what defines us, what saves us? Go to an American football contest and universally there's no point in sitting down, cause everyone's up and shouting different shit. The guy next to you actually roots for the other team, yells fucked up shit about [enter your favorite athlete's name here], and when he turns to you, he says, "No offense," and he actually kinda means it. He's just that guy. And--generally--it's okay for you to root your thing from where you are. Yes, certainly it's dangerous at an Oakland Raiders game (in fact it's entirely possible you could get shot), but that has nothing to do with your allegiance or lack thereof.

The point is (x 2), American aren't homogenous. Maybe that's why we're so fucked up and have so many problems. Maybe that's why this place is diverse and beautiful and almost no matter where you go you don't have to eat a hamburger if you don't want to.

Small Press

Molly Gaudry has just announced a bunch of stuff, cool stuff, ambitious and viable stuff. She's working now as an independent publicist. Along with that, she's initiating a small press collective. Molly talked to me about this at AWP and it sounded like a great idea then, but it really was only an idea. In the last few weeks, Molly's run with that idea and has accountants and lawyers helping to get her started. I talked to her on the phone today, and she has innovative ideas for getting books to readers, and not just the small press and literary readership that contemporary lit has niched itself into. Molly's talking about, like, my mom reading Lindsay Hunter's Daddy's, for example. And why not? My mom would love that book. But she doesn't know that it (or Featherproof Books, for that matter) even fucking exists. If you publish books, you should send your favorite to Molly so she can maybe help you sell it. She'll kick ass at this.

In other news: it's no longer cold here. Maybe it will stay that way? It's been in the 70s. I wore shorts to teach yesterday. My students were awesome. They've been reading Nineteen Eighty-four. I know that's a book you normally read in high school. I'm teaching it in English 101. That's mostly because I'd never read it, and wanted to, and knew that I'd never get around to it unless I was teaching it cause I got a stack of to-read that's reaching the moon. I love those ridiculous hyperbolic comparisons you hear on Discovery Channel documentaries. They say things like "Jamie has so many books that he owns but has not yet read, that if those books were golf balls, and you put all of those golf balls in the Grand Canyon, they would fill the Grand Canyon to a depth of three feet. That's three feet of golf balls." My students had all this stuff they wanted to talk about with the book. They've really taken to it. They're all interested in what's happened in Egypt and what's going on in Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan--all over the autocratic world. These are the same students who, a week ago, didn't know what a season was. Next week I think we'll get to seasonings. Maybe we'll eat. Class starts at lunchtime.

I don't know why I'm posting all this stuff about my students. I guess it's cause I care about them and their success, but they're also in some ways sadly funny. Today I was talking about critical thinking. I kinda break that down into two components: paying attention to your senses, and asking questions. I had them go outside and record every sensory impression they could for about ten minutes. When they came back the thing they kept talking about was that it was cold outside. So first we talked about describing that in sensory ways, which they did pretty good at. Then I asked them why. They said why what. I said why's it cold. They said cause it's winter. I said why's it winter. They said cause it's a season. I said what's a season and why do we have them. It took them a long time to think about that, but eventually they got saying because the Earth turns on an axis. I said yes that makes night and day for us on the planet but what makes seasons? One student yelled because god made it that way. I said okay but is there a more direct reason what if someone in the class doesn't believe in god that doesn't answer the question for them. The idea that someone wouldn't believe in god was weird to them but they got past it. Finally we got to that the earth wobbles on its axis, and right now that wobble has angled the planet so that sunlight does not hit north america as directly as it does, say, Chile right now where it's summer. They all agreed that that sounded right. I said why. They said why what. I said why does Earth wobble on its axis. Now they were really stumped. So I said that about four billion years ago before Earth solidified another forming planet about the size of mars slammed into what would become our planet, and this cataclysm caused axial tilt and created our moon and that without this violent moment in Earth's early history life would not be possible. They said why would you believe that and not the bible. Then I laughed.

Somewhat related to students (i.e., mine)

On the way to class this morning listening to NPR I heard this story, which came on the heels of this story.

I thought it weird that no one kinda put the two together, at least directly. The NYU sociology professor at one point said that college professors work hard, but that in many cases the sole criteria for judging their effectiveness is student evaluations. As an adjunct professor, that's certainly the case for me. I had an administrator visit my class once after I got hired, and said admin person sat there for five minutes, took some notes, and walked out and I never heard anything about a "faculty eval."

So in order to get good student evals many professors don't have rigorous coursework, are entertaining, and grade easily. All = happy students = good evals = keeping job = students don't learn.

On top of that there's retention. Whenever they say not-for-profit college or university that's some serious bullshit. They need those people in seats otherwise budget cuts are gonna force layoffs. So it's in the professors' and administrators' favor to be easy in order to keep college enrollments up. All of that = happy stupid unemployable students.

AWP is getting old

or it's very likely more like I'm getting old because I was fucking hurting yesterday and today. today I jogged and that felt really good cause I didn't do anything of that in washington dc and all I did was eat shitty food and get a little drunk well okay actually especially on friday night I got a lottle drunk and was having trouble standing and slurred quite a bit and saturday morning I asked a bunch of people who I partied with if they made it to the party at all and they were all like, yeah dude, I was with you all night. awp you're fun probably too much for me, fuck i'm going to be someone's dad.