A minute to spare . . .

I got my last grade turned in at 11:59 p.m. Ha.

Notes on "last grades":

a. it was really only my last possible grade, since there are students I am still (still!) hounding for last assignments. I can't stand it when they were good students and then something . . . whatever! happens, and there's no portfolio or whatnot. I can't stand it!

b. Microsoft Outlook ate a comment, a lovely, long, thoughtful comment, that I wrote for a student writer because it thought it needed to log off. I have some choice words for Microsoft Outlook, but since my lovely aunt may occasionally read this blog, I will just say: I have some choice words for you, Microsoft Outlook, so you better stay out of my way or else cough up that comment you ate.

c. I must reconstruct the above comment, plus write some more for a few more students. But hey, the grades are in! And they're high!

d. High grades = character flaw on part of teacher? Discuss.

e. All my grading bones and muscles are achy and tight.

Open Letter to End of the Semester Evaluation of Students:

End of the Semester Evaluation of Students, you loom over every interesting, writerly, inventive idea I have to make writing pleasurable or compelling. You and your rheumy eyes, your hacking cough, your irritating standards.

I hate you, End of the Semester Evaluation of Students. You make me feel weak. When you are near--and when are you NOT near, E.o.t.S.E.o.S.?--you fill me with self-doubt. You are nothing but a self-fulfilling monologue: "They cannot write. They cannot write. No one will believe that this is writing. Think of what the Others will say when they know that you said this student could write! This student cannot write. None of your students can really write." Really, you could be an endless loop of yourself. You, perhaps more than any other Presence in my professional life, End of the Semester Evaluation of Students, conjure up a factory, in which my teaching is just another (sing it with me now) brick in the wall.

End of the Semester Evaluation of Students, why don't you just do all the grading yourself and leave me out of it? The way you go on, it seems like that's what you'd rather, anyway. In any case, I am now officially giving you the cold shoulder. When I think of my students and their writing, I will think of the funny or beautiful things they wrote--intentional or not--and how words always wiggle and do acrobatics, instead of staying under control the way you pretend they do and can, if I had only taught the students how to write rather than how not to write, which is what I apparently do, according to you, End of the Semester Evaluation of Students. Well, how about this: I gave a bunch of high grades! So chew on that, old man, Mr. Professor of They Can't Write, Ph.D. No matter what you say, I'm the one pushing the A button to signify all the writing they can or can't do.

And now? The semester is over. I hope you're going somewhere gloomy for vacation, because you really wouldn't enjoy a lovely location, where people don't care about the writing they can't do, just as in the rest of their lives they only worry about their writing maybe eight percent of the time. Unlike me, being loomed over by you.

Stop the looming. I quit you, End of the Semester Evaluation of Students: I quit you I quit you I quit you! So stop bothering me.

Sincerely,

Professor H.T. Megastore

Big fat novels.

Taking a page from Dr. Write:

I find that I don't read longer works--by which I mean anything longer than a long New Yorker article--these days, particularly during the school year. I could moan about it, but I've mostly accepted it as a fact of my life. But! I hold in my heart the fond, fond fondness for long novels, the longer the better (assuming that they're delightful to begin with). Here is a list of long novels that I have loved at different points in my life:

1. Middlemarch. I wrote my master's thesis on this book and it is canonical to me, as in, it is a kind of secular scripture that I consult, at least in memory, to help me live my life.

2. Our Mutual Friend. It is my favorite Dickens, and I love many Dickens novels, including Bleak House and David Copperfield and Little Dorrit, sometimes known as Little Dork at my house.

3. Humboldt's Gift. I read this when the world was in thrall to Bellow, and I know that Herzog is considered his masterpiece, but I love Humboldt the best, partly for the part where the narrator reports that a woman had taken refuge in Humboldt's bathroom, whereupon he importuned, "Open the door! I have a big cock!" It tells everything you need to know about poets--a lot of them, anyway.

4. The Thorn Birds. This falls into the category of "unworthy, really, of your time, and don't you have something better to do?" Except it was for a class! in contemporary American fiction! and the professor, whom I loved--he had a buzz cut and a big belly and a hilarious, cartoon character voice--chose it as a representative of the popular novel. I loved that he did that. I was pregnant when I read it, and I stayed in bed all day, exaggerating a slight illness and missing a French literature exam to do it.

5. Harry Potter (take your pick). Ever since college daughter, who was then junior high daughter, read the very first HP on the drive up to Idaho, and kept saying, "This is amazing! This is so good! Wow" etc. until I wanted to rip the book from her hands and let her drive, I have had the most fun reading these books, and also had the joy of a genuine shared literary experience with my kids and extended family, reading, anticipating, and arguing fiercely over these books. Definitely one of my best reading experiences ever.

6. Cloudsplitter. I read this book on a vacation, a dark winter vacation in Mendocino during the week between Christmas and New Year. It was gray and cloudy and rainy most of the time. We stayed in a lot, bundled up, by the wood stove and read and read and read. This book, based on the life of John Brown and told from the fictive point of view of one of his sons, was an apocalyptic read. Matched up very well with the darkest part of the year.

7. Underworld. I know I have already raved on about this book, but truly. It is the greatest of great books in my pantheon of greatiosity. I love its scope, I love that all of the characters feel like people and not like "characters." I love Delillo's writing--the way he makes a sentence. I will never quit Delillo. Never.