Wednesday, June 1, 2022
Blogging about poetry in May 2022
Sunday, May 22, 2022
Meetings and Happiness?
Those weekly IRIS Center meetings
[Part of a series on "Meetings and Happiness."]
I discovered a cool glitch in the system.
This semester, the IRIS Center folks -- Kristine Hildebrandt, Jessica DeSpain, and Meg Smith -- held open office hours on Thursdays at 10:00 am for any faculty member who wanted to ask questions about tech-related projects. They also had a standing IRIS meeting at 3:00 pm on Thursdays.
I jokingly viewed their setup as a glitch because it meant I could receive all these free weekly consultations and assistance on my major projects. I felt like I was getting some secret advantage.
It's quite common, I've learned, for literature professors to work in isolation. In many cases, people work on articles, book manuscripts, and special projects by themselves. However, I do much better when I talk through ideas before and while I'm working on scholarly projects.
The IRIS Center open office hours and afternoon meetings provided me with a crucial opportunity to gather my ideas and get input for the projects I was working on this semester. By the time I sat down to write or develop a project, I had gotten useful input from Hildebrandt, DeSpain, and Smith.
Those weekly, two-hour meetings didn't feel like meetings. They were a mix of brainstorming, advice-giving, news-sharing, fact-gathering sessions. I looked forward to attending each week.
Related:Lunches with Donavan Ramon
More discussion concerning my happiness this semester....
I am viewed as one of Ramon's "faculty mentors," though I sometimes shy away from that designation. But then, I did recall the approach of my own faculty mentor, Eugene B. Redmond, my first year at SIUE in 2003-2004. Monday - Thursday, Redmond would call me to have brief conversations at 7:00 am. For my entire first year!
I wouldn't do Ramon like that. But I did decide to establish a weekly lunch with him so we could talk about teaching, research and writing, and adjusting to SIUE. So that's what we did. For his entire first year.
We had a good time. And we both learned a lot. We got to trade ideas on novels and scholarly works. We got to think about what worked and didn't work in our classes. We reflected on our past experiences as undergraduates and graduates students. We speculated about next year's students. And on and on. Really good times.
Our colleagues Cindy Reed and Elizabeth Cali sometimes joined us for some of the lunches.
Ramon and I really settled into a groove with our discussions by his second semester. Our meetings, along with the other ones I was having, were integral to my ability to have such a happy semester.
This long-running conversation with Elizabeth Cali
Extending some points on my happiness this semester....
Nearly every Wednesday afternoon and then every Thursday morning after the IRIS meetings, I would meet with my colleague Elizabeth Cali.
She and I have been talking, nearly non-stop about African American literary studies, classroom approaches, black writers and culture, and popular culture for about seven years at this point. We hired Cali to teach African American literature in our department in 2014, which is when we initiated this long-running conversation.
This semester was special because beyond usual conversations, we worked on the ins and outs of a podcast project we're collaborating on. We devised a plan for the project, and we recruited several professors to contribute scripts. So this project gave us even more to discuss this semester.
Cali is unusually knowledgeable and energetic about histories of black literary art. She's read everything it seems so I'm always learning something new, or realizing something new I need to read.
What became even clearer this semester is how good she is at offering creative responses to particular behaviors. In short, she's a good problem solver. Being aware of that knowledge, I would email her about unsolved problems early or late in the week, and by the time we'd meet each mid-week, she'd have various possible approaches we might consider.
Our long-running conversations do doubt contributed to my high levels of happiness this semester.
Related:"Let me ask you a quick question": Meetings with Cindy Reed
[Part of a series on "Meetings and Happiness."]
Two years ago, we hired Cindy Reed. She and I did not get to talk as much her first year because the university was largely online because of Covid restrictions. But we've been catching up since she returned to full in-person this semester.
Thursday, May 19, 2022
Number of unique words in four novels by Toni Morrison
[Some preliminary notes on a project that my brother Kenton and I are working on. Thanks to poet/professor Opal Moore for the nudge.]
Have you ever thought about Toni Morrison's word usage, and specifically the number of unique words she uses in multiple novels? I was curious, and decided to do a few measurements.
For the purposes of comparison, I needed a baseline, so I took a look at the first 5,000 words in two of Morrison's novels: The Bluest Eye (1970) and Beloved (1987). Off the top, before any calculations, I assumed that Beloved would have the most extensive vocabulary, mainly because it's one of the most critically-acclaimed American and African American novels.
My assumption was wrong.
Take a look.
I later added Sula (1973) to the mix. It contains 1,563 unique words, topping both The Bluest Eye and Beloved. And later still, I added Paradise (1997), which contains 1,788 unique words among the first 5,000 words of the novel.