Bite me

So, we had get-together at a local brew pub to celebrate the awarding of tenure to some friends and colleagues. They gave us the back room, since about thirty people showed up, and two servers just for us, and plenty of food and drink contributed to the merriment. My wife Coco and I had been among the first to arrive and I placed the first food order, a "Hawaii 5-0" burger (pineapple and teriyaki sauce) with a veggie patty for me and a salad with added tofu for my sweetie.

You might surmise that we have a vegetarian household, the two of us. Coco became a vegetarian when she was a kid, and has been at it for over twenty years now. She just doesn't want to eat any animals, simple as that. I starting cutting all meat out of my diet about fifteen years ago, having already given up beef; that process accelerated when I met Courtney. My motivation is more eco-political, having to do with factory farms and additives and so on, so I'll have some fresh-caught fish a few times a year or some organic, free-range, psychologically-well-adjusted, high-self-esteem chicken when I can get it. It's easier just to go vegetarian most of the time.

So, the tofu and salad came, and so did lots of other people's food, sliders and salads and nachos, and some mini corn dogs for my administrative assistant. But no Hawaii 5-0. I caught the server and by the look in her eye I could tell that she had forgotten to put the order in; she mumbled something about the kitchen and went off, coming back a little while later to tell me they were right on it.

A few minutes later an expediter came and brought me someone else's burger.

I caught the server again and explained and she rolled her eyes and headed back to the kitchen. A few minutes later, she came back with the other server assigned to our room, and they both set a Hawaii 5-0 before me. I thanked them and took a big bite.

Of a hot, juicy, beef patty. For the first time in probably twenty years.

I was french-kissing the Devil. My eyebrows shot up as sense memory kicked in, blasting open synapses that had been long shut. This was a good burger. The flavor, texture, and temperature were all perfect; it was enticing, voluptuous and powerful, the taste cutting through the toppings and bun to deliver pure, distilled essence of hamburger to my tongue and brain. The Tempter had chosen his form well.

I put the sandwich down and stared at it on my plate in silence for a long moment. Then, at a break in the conversation, I said to my tablemates "This is not veggie." A look of horror from Coco and a flurry of concern from everyone else met the announcement, clucks of disapproval and craned necks. The waitress was once again summoned, and with defeated posture she took the plate away to return to the kitchen yet again with this order from Hell. Eventually, the correct meal came, all was well, and we laughed and drank and gave congratulations. The fuss and feathers around my order from start to finish took shape as just one of the minor anecdotes that would come out of the evening.

Except that from the darkest corner of the pub I could hear Old Scratch chuckling.

False spring

Today's weather seems to mirror the state of the series of changes heretofore described in this post. At least in the northeast section of the city, today looks like summer, or at least spring break: mostly blue skies, some fluffy clouds, and lots of sunshine. The light coming though the windows warms the room I am in quite effectively, so that shorts and bare feet seem entirely appropriate. Of course, a simple walk to the curb to check the mail puts lie to those appearances: there's still quite a nip in the air, and a few errant raindrops remind me that we are not at all into the dry season.

Such is it with my transition from deaconal to didactic responsibilities. Last Wednesday was my last day in-service as a dean; we had the farewell lunch and the after-work drinks, the card and balloons and the bottle of champagne, and the genuine sense that this was actually happening. I am technically on vacation now, and I sure look like a between-quarters faculty member again: hanging out at home, running through training modules for a new e-learning platform and blowing the dust off my syllabus to update it.

But the transition hasn't really taken hold yet; appearances to the contrary, I am still deaning it. First of all, this is a typical administrative vacation, meaning I am on email tying off loose ends, providing needed info, putting out fires, and so on. I even went into the office for a short time last Friday to handle some time-sensitive issues.  Further, I will be continuing some of the responsibilities I had as dean as my service (non-teaching) workload when I return to faculty; I will continue to manage a number of projects without missing a step. And while there is an interim plan to respond to the vacancy my "migration" (as our president calls it) creates, I don't expect a permanent solution anytime soon. While I gave notice of my intended transition on December 3rd, the first campus meeting to discuss options was not held until February 26th, and I am not anticipating a swift resolution to the situation.

So, I expect that I will live for a while with a foot in each camp: continuing to "think like a dean" when it comes to advancing the initiatives I have kept on my plate and trying to "think like an instructor" when it comes to developing my class and working with students again. I'm not sure that I will be able to completely let go of my appointment until a permanent replacement (of one sort or another) is found and my colleagues and former staff can stop covering my area as well as theirs. Until then, that thing devoutly to be wished - a transition of my focus from the macro to the micro, a decrement in responsibility - will be just out of reach, and those halcyon days when my blog posts were cute and fun, or reflective and insightful, instead of serious or dour will not return quite yet.

On a walk around the lake today, a dear friend opined that this plan of mine to disengage somewhat from work will not last long. She's probably correct, but we'll never know unless I get it started.

Up, up and away.

Good try, yellow brick road

I'm going to try to do this without sounding too cranky or curmudgeonly.

On a walk over the weekend, I chanced upon this sidewalk sign at a local fitness center:

Now, by the tagline on the readerboard, one would imagine that the ad is meant to invoke the the iconic "Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!" chant from The Wizard of Oz (Judy Garland version). This should be a simple matter, but in a mere seven words the sign fails.

Much of the allure of this trope lies in its rhythm, as a viewing of the linked video shows. The meter is dactyl-dactyl-molossus  - or more simply Long-short-short/Long-short-short/Long-Long-Long - or even more simply [two-syllable word] AND [two-syllable word] AND [one-syllable word] OH MY. Any effective pastiche of this expression must conform to this rhythm to be successful.

This sign has all the necessary elements: Yoga and Zumba are both two-syllable words, and Barre is a one-syllable word. But the words are configured inappropriately. Barre clearly needs to come last, just to maintain the meter; an added bonus is that Barre is a slant rhyme to bear, emphasizing the imitation. The unstressed uh sounds at the end of Yoga and Zumba are nearly assonant to an unstressed er sound, so either could come in the middle spot to evoke tiger; I would place zumba there and put yoga in first place for a visual match with the o in lion.

So, instead of

Zumba and Barre and Yoga, oh my!

we would have

Yoga and Zumba and Barre, oh my!

Demonstrably better. And I say that only to illustrate that when English teachers grade writing, it is not purely subjective; there are objective measures to which we can, and do, look.

Up, up and away.

Analog jam

Nu, I have been cleaning out the office over the past few weeks and getting rid of stuff, including books. After having worked in a library, I have come to want own fewer books rather than more: after all, I know that most books can be in my hand in no time at all, more easily than ever now with the advent of e-books. (I have never been one to fetishize the artifacts themselves: it is the text that matters most, not the delivery box.) The exception I have most consistently made involves obscure, out-of-print or hard-to-find books; I will hold onto those. And I am not entirely without sentiment: a few books are keepsakes. The two pairs of volumes that I am now thinking about fall across both those categories.

The first set at hand is the Columbia-Viking Desk Encyclopedia, complete in two volumes. (For some reason "Aa to Lavaca Bay" has been burned into my brain, but I had to look at its spine to see that the second volume is "Laval, F.X. de to Zworykin." I guess the second does have less euphony.) I have a battered 1968 edition; the first copyright was 1953. These are among the few books that I remember being in the house in Brooklyn when I was a child, and I took them away with me, first to college and then cross-country to the west coast.

For years, this set was my go-to source during discussions or debates, a Whitman's Sampler of Western Civilization, as good for a late-night stroll through new neighborhoods of knowledge as it was for finding the point that settled a disagreement. After going to the movies, I would come home and look up people or places or historical events mentioned in the film, following related words through as many entries as possible before I had had my fill. Now, of course, I just come home to Google and Wikipedia.

This delightful little pair of books takes up less space than a gallon of milk, and could easily rest in peace on my bookshelf. But to what end, I have to ask myself? It is hopelessly out of date. Sure, the short entry on the Dutch East India Company will hold onto whatever relevance it has, but Neil Armstrong has no listing and the Vietnam entry just mentions that U.S. ground and air forces were committed to the region and ends with "A constituent assembly was elected in 1966 to draft a new constitution." A lot has happened since 1968: think about it.

And it's not like the books have a lot else to recommend them. This is no 1911 Britannica: there is no deathless prose and the list of contributors holds no names that are recognizable, much less famous, today. As find as I am of these books, unassuming is the word that comes to mind when describing them.

The next entry is quite the opposite.

The People's Almanac by David "Reclaiming-My-Ethnic-Heritage" Wallechinsky and his dad, writer Irving Wallace, are about as assuming as it gets. Released in 1975 and 1978, this series is painfully counter-culture and in-your-face alternative. The books purported to "go beyond often repeated, unchallenged data and offer the behind-the scenes, frequently omitted truths." For example, the entries in the "World Nations" chapter of this almanac have the subheadings Location, How Created, Size, Population, Who Rules, and Who REALLY Rules. This take can be both refreshing and annoying.

It is useful to have an unvarnished account of U.S. history, without the typical whitewashing. For example, the books remind us of the medal awarded to Charles Lindbergh by Hitler in 1939 and how Lindbergh blamed America's involvement in World War 2 on "the British, the Jews, and the Roosevelt administration." However, the books suffer from sloppy scholarship and writing. In this example, the clear implication is that Lindbergh made his remark when he received the medal, when in fact, the quotation comes from a speech given in Des Moines in September 1941. (And I'm no Lindbergh scholar, but it only took 45 seconds on Google to find a citation.)

When the books are not "lifting a few historic rocks to see what crawls beneath" they are reveling in the groovy: "She Wrote It, He Got the Credit," "Dictionary of Sex Related Terms," and "Inside the Good Earth: What's Going On under Our Feet?" are some of the sections. Many of these are entertaining; many of them fall into the trap of accepting the anti-establishment set of facts without demanding proof, as much as the almanacs they were counter to accepted the establishment line. A good example is the book's non-critical take on long-lived Georgians in "Guide to Shangri-La: The Leading Longevity Sites on Earth."

The  biggest flaw in the series, however, is its lack of organization. I remember a collection of some teaching stories, little monk parables, that I enjoyed from the book; I cannot find them again. The section headings are clever rather than descriptive; the indices are underdeveloped; and with almost 3,000 pages between the two volumes, browsing for anything specific is useless. It has been 35 years and I still haven't found the stories again.

There are some gems in here.  In the chapter "Eureka! - Science and Technology," the section "Can Man Change the Climate?" ends with "Of course, no one knows for sure whether the atmosphere's temperature will increase because of the increased carbon dioxide, or if it does, what effect it will have on climate. We do know, however, that the effect of increased carbon dioxide in the air needs further study." Right on, man.

In Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, one protagonist spends the last hours before post-comet-strike social breakdown securing his personal library in a septic tank, each book preserved with bug spray and sealed in ziplock bag. He later buys his way out of the chaos and into an enclave of civilization with Volume 2 of The Way Things Work and the admonition that Volume 1 and four thousand other books were in a safe place.

I am not sure that either the Columbia-Viking Desk Encyclopedia or the People's Almanac would make that cut; their usefulness in rebuilding civilization is questionable. Clearly, the books are markers of their age; in fact, their juxtaposition tells much about what "the Sixties" were actually all about. I am not sure that cultural curiosity is enough for them to keep their places on my shelf, and I don't think I'll be storing them in a septic tank vault, but I must see some value in these paper wikipedias or they would have gone to the thrift store long ago.