What Are You Going To Do About It?

On September 18^th, I took my English class to McClung Museum in the hopes of better illustrating literary history; what happened, however, left me with my heart hanging out. We had been reading Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, a novella from 1688 about an African prince from Corimantien (now modern Ghana) taken in slavery and sold to a plantation in South America. I’ve taught this important piece of literature for years, but I had never connected the class to the museum resources, and it seemed like a good way to keep the students engaged, especially on a Friday morning, with paper deadlines looming. Little did I know. Robert Rennie at the museum had assembled for us some eighteenth-century maps of Africa, some drawings, and three devastating objects from the museum’s collection: a gun from 1702, a ball and chain shackle from a South Carolina plantation (circa 1706) and a copy of The Wealth of Nations owned by an ancestor of Frank McClung, “Chaz.” McClung. The gun, clearly owned by a wealthy person, was probably used on a colonial plantation; the shackle most certainly was. Rennie told the students to touch the shackle, and in fact to pass the ball and chain around the room. He then pointed out that the reader of The Wealth of Nations (white, wealthy, and educated) could talk about the global economy in intellectual, disembodied, macroeconomic terms because he didn’t have to confront the reality of the shackle; he literally didn’t have to see it. But we did. 

I could see my students doing the complex work of synthesizing their cognitive understanding of the story and these objects with a more corporeal encounter that was happening to all of us. It was in their eyes.  What would mean for an individual to muster the psychological, physical, and material resources to resist being a slave? Hard teaching indeed, but history wasn’t done with us. Dr. Amadou Sall from Africana studies was with us for the class and talked to us about other cases of royal family members who were enslaved in the eighteenth century.  As he finished, he challenged us with the claim that slavery is far from over, not just in other countries but in the U.S. as well. Long after the Emancipation Proclamation, Knoxville is a hub of modern human trafficking, largely due to the highway system and a web-based trade that supplies johns with victims on demand, at large sporting events, conventions, and motels. Stunned by all of this information, Dr. Sall turned his observation into challenge: “now that you know this, what are you going to do about it?”

I realize that “British Literature, 1660-1740” is hardly a course title that conjures images of immediate application, ethical challenge, or activism. I didn’t take my students into the archive for that purpose. But this is what the humanities will do when we take the human experience seriously.  I have been teaching this novella for years now and for many reasons.  It’s an important achievement in the history of the novel; it became a significant abolitionist piece of literature, though Behn’s original politics have more to do with her own royalism; and it blurs the lines between travel narrative, biography, fiction, and romance in ways that landmark novels after it, such as Robinson Crusoe, would also do. But I have never been asked what I am going to do about it.

Paul Ricoeur has talked about historical memory as the confrontation between the body as object and the body as lived. To understand that other bodies have been made objects is a known fact, part of what we know to be history, but to confront the present tense of that process, bringing our own lived experiences into the equation is to realize that history makes demands on us; we can’t “unknow” this knowledge, and while we can try to forget it or repress it, we know it will be back. The history of race relations in this country is punctuated by those returns, the unfinished lessons we thought we could skip over because they made people uncomfortable. Modern human trafficking, both of sex workers and of general workers who are held captive in a variety of ways, raises new notes of urgency, along with a temptation to despair before such evidence of the human capacity for inhumanity or how, as Rochester put it, “savage man alone does man betray.”

So Monday morning, my students brought the question back to me: Dr. Anderson, what do you do about it? My answer was embarrassingly thin, so I promised to learn more about the situation right here in Knoxville and to report back.  Since then, we have learned about the Community Coalition Against Human Trafficking (CCAHT.org), which is providing us with more information resources and some opportunities for action: an Oct. 15^th fundraiser, a January 30^th 5K “Run for their Lives” to raise awareness and funds; and the possibilities for other kinds of creative resource collaborations with UT.  It’s a small organization doing all it can to make connections between victims and other agencies, to help agencies coordinate with each other, even to train installers from the cable company (who might be allowed in a house with trafficked girls) to recognize the signs. You can learn more about those signs and the state of sex trafficking in the U.S. from the National Human Trafficking Resource Center.

Something happened in our class, which has been spending time in UT archives all year long, archives which fortunately were not all as traumatizing as this one. Some of our time has been with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century books in Hodges Special Collections, carefully selected by Chris Caldwell, where we’ve discovered some kinder, gentler messages: handwritten marginalia, a young reader practicing his signature, a pressed flower from 325 years ago. Together, we’ve been getting our hands dirty. We felt a shared sense of obligation at the discovery that people are being trafficked right here in Knoxville, and we decided collectively not to ignore it; we are working out our collective and individual responses as we are able. One student is now taking this topic on as her final project for the class on the long history of representations of slavery, connecting it to the horrifying scale of human trafficking in east Tennessee, much of it involving minors. She is organizing her entire dorm and planning an education event for this semester. There’s some talk of a gallery show of these and other McClung artifacts in conjunction with next semester’s screening and discussion of Traces of the Trade. Others are thinking about training themselves to work in museums and archives where we can preserve and begin to read the traces of human history. I am in awe of so much in this picture: the museum and library staff and archivists like Robert Rennie, Lindsay Wainright, Chris Caldwell, and Louisa Trott who make this kind of class possible. I am also in awe of my students and their open-hearted responses to history. The archive opens to our slightest touch, our curiosity about the past. What are you going to do about it?

Belated update: on Tuesday, November 17th, 2015, my students hosted a teach-in event at the Howard Baker Center, with Kate Trudell of the CCAHT, Cynthia Deitle of the FBI, and Jonathan Scoonover, CCAHT Board President. Over 330 people attended, with standing room only for most of them. Students donated hundreds of volunteer hours at an inVOLvment fair just after the presenation, and thanks to Sarah Primm and South Carrick Hall, we made a donation of $500 to CCAHT (these are students, mind you, who sold T-shirts to raise the money), with the hope of more on the way. I could not be more honored to be their professor. They are already changing the world.

Just Say Vol

I was caught up short by the recent kerfuffle at the University of Tennessee over the suggested gender-neutral pronouns, in part because it seemed to make the national news before I heard any local discussion. You may have heard of it by now: ze, xe, hir, zir, etc. as replacements for the gendered pronouns. The folks who posted the rubric wanted, if I understand correctly, to explain some of the terms preferred by those who feel the gender binary (she/he, her/him, hers/his) doesn't represent them. Note that there is a big difference between "suggested" and "mandated," a distinction that was either lost on or misreported to many. Summer Awad wrote a fantastic column about it in the Daily Beacon. Well, the university decided we'd had quite enough time to talk about that and, on Friday, September 4, took the rubric down.

Even though these guidelines have been adopted at Ohio University, Harvard, and the University of Vermont, among others, I must admit I didn’t react so well when I saw them. If I'm being completely honest with myself, maybe I was miffed that the advocates of gender-neutral language didn't come to the English department first. I know we get a bad rap as the grammar police, which, believe me, was not the job I thought I was signing up for, as you may have surmised by my use of a dangling preposition just now. But I've had this exchange too many times to ignore the fact that the world does not see me as I see myself.  As in:
        "So what do you do?"
        "I'm an English professor."
         "Oh gosh, I better watch my grammar around you."
I get misrecognized all the time. What I want to explain to all those strangers suddenly stressing out about subjects and objects is that what I do is all about stories, people, and the love of teaching. Throw in a lot of history as well. These are the endlessly fascinating and inspiring things to me and to most of my colleagues in English near and far, who include dictionary-makers, thousands of nerd literary historians, and yes, grammarians. As a tribe, we are actually pretty open to sociolinguistic change. We celebrate the new words entering the dictionary each year; I am especially fond of "winethirty" and "awesomesauce." two joyful signs that our language is alive and growing. I relish both the novelty and the vintage materials of these neologisms. But more years of study than I care to remember have yielded this insight: language rarely changes by fiat (anyone out there remember Esperanto?). However, it does, thanke ye olde Lorde in the Firmaement above our heades, change. So if there was a shared flaw in the plan of the the folks who proposed the pronouns and the administrators who pulled them down, perhaps it was this paradox: language comes from usage. It is the currency in our exchanges of thoughts, feelings, and ideas, and we are coining and recoining the stuff all the time in the ways we talk to one another.

Which brings me to the south.  Yes, I am a southerner, complicated as that relationship is most days. When the south and I are both on our best behavior, I revel in the fact that this is where I am from (a feeling which demands another dangling preposition), and I can only hope that the south kind of likes me too. So it seems perfectly meet, right, and salutary that in my Tennessee home, sometime around winethirty, as I was agonizing about this language kerfuffle, I had an epiphany. The south has always embraced a gender-neutral pronoun: y'all. The south's own second person pronoun has been around for ages, like the French "vous," but so much sweeter--utterly welcoming, informal, and the embodiment of the embrace of the self in the world. It's like Martin Buber's "I-thou" relation had a grammatical love child with Emmanuel Levinas' "face-to-face" encounter, and the little tyke is introducing everyone to everyone in your living room, where all your friends and crazy relatives are coming and going, just like we do in the south.  Y'all come over here. Y’all know Fred? Y'all need anything? Y'all come back now, y'hear?

This last line, the signature of southern send-ups and actual southerners alike, is where we have to get serious about our intentions. Who is welcome, and in whose home? And where this all goes down, folks, is in the third person, something that “y’all” does not entirely cover. Him/her, he/she, his/hers: these are the pronouns who live their lives haunted by the same ghost, "it." And “it” is the category where people hurt and get hurt. When we think in the third person, we can be tempted by our lesser selves to throw away someone's humanity because they don't fit the gender match-game that assures so many of their place in this scary world. If you are one of the folks who aren't so easily matched, it is much worse. Scary is a euphemism for how that space can feel. We are constantly faced with this choice in a broad array of encounters: theologian Miraslov Volf called it "exclusion and embrace." In our best moments, humans have affirmed each other across boundaries of every imaginable sort: the note slipped under a jail cell from Amnesty International that says "you are not alone"; Gentiles smuggling Jews out of Amsterdam and Berlin; Muslims shielding their Christian neighbors; the kid everywhere who stands up to the bully on the playground everywhere and says "no, you're not getting this one--not today." And then, there are are the not so shining moments. I don't have to go on.  Just turn each one of these scenes around.

So yes, I am all for language that makes more people feel welcome, language that connects, affirms, and embraces. But since it takes a while for language to shift, maybe we can look closer to home for a temporary solution. We’ve spent a lot of time in the last few years branding UT and the “VOL” name for use by its sports teams, but also initiatives (VOLVision, Hire-a-VOL, VOLmail) and various activities that signal welcome (VOLsconnect. The InVOLvement Fair, VOL Talks and Walks). We seem to have a new VOL campaign every week. The message is that UT Vols are connected to each other, that they share a community and a vision, that they embrace the stranger from abroad (I-VOL) and the little stranger at home applying for admission (Become a VOL). We have some pretty extensive rhetorical work invested in the project of making this recognizable monosyllable the welcome mat of our big orange house. As such, it provides the perfect pronoun:
          I-----Y'all---Vol.
It's an elegant and decidedly home-grown solution, raised right here on good ol’ Rocky Top.  It showcases my home team at its best and gives them a chance to show what they know about southern hospitality, beginning with the invitation spoken in a language that unites rather than divides Team VOL. It also has a grammatically simplifying effect—one-stop shopping for your third-person pronouns:  
         Who went to the store? Vol went to the store!
          To whom do you want to send that letter? I want to send it to vol.
          Whose Diet Coke is that? It's vol's, and you better not touch it!
You may never have to worry about the subjective, objective, or possessive case again. Hallelujah!

When we say that we are Vols, we are claiming a family identity that is southern culture at its best. To share this identity is to invite each other into the room with our language, calling each other by name, without exclusion and with the full embrace of words we share, use, and shape with our attitudes, desires, hopes, and imagination. George Takei started a revolution a few years ago when he offered his name as a loving, humorous shield to those who felt vulnerable. John Wesley started a revolution when he embraced the name that others were using to insult his little band of believers, the Methodists, otherwise known as the freaks of the eighteenth-century religious world. We have an opportunity here to go much deeper than university branding, which has done us the righteous favor of putting this term front and center at the intersection of history, language, and our better natures. This could be a chance to tell people who we really are and what it means to be a Tennessee Vol. If we mean it. So, what are y'all afraid of? Just say vol.

Here I Stand

Unperson. Thoughtcrime. De-tenure. The first two words of this list are from the novelist George Orwell's 1984; the last is from the University of Tennessee's "advocacy" page, reporting on the most recent Board of Trustees meeting. Though Chancellor Jimmy Cheek reported to the Faculty Senate Monday afternoon that the term was a "typo" and the website issued a correction that made it disappear from the record faster than an Orwellian "unperson," it lingers in the air, as does the content of its context, which was item 6 in a list of cost-saving or revenue-generating procedures proposed by President Joe Di Pietro. The university has current procedures for firing tenured professors, by the way, for cause, including misconduct, low performance reviews, financial exigency, and program consolidation, procedures which have been endorsed by the faculty and the administration, as is appropriate to the model of shared governance that is supposed to be a part of university life. These procedures take a while, as I believe they should, in order to guard against witch hunts or personality conflicts unfairly eliminating someone who spent close to 10 years (after the B.A.) training for their degree, competed with between 50 and 120 other qualified candidates in their particular field to get the job, and then another 6 to 7 publishing, teaching, and serving well enough to be awarded tenure. With tenurable professorships so precious, believe me, "no one wants to see ineffective faculty members at UT" (a direct quote from my colleague Mary McAlpin); we have procedures for removing them.

So let's be clear about the set-up in the proposal: the 6-point proposal presents the (false) spectre of so many lazy faculty members growing fat on the University's dime that the category is a target for cost savings. This spectre panders to the worst of legislators' and Tennesseans' attitudes about higher education and in no way reflects the dedication, productivity, and downright selflessness to which I have been witness pretty much every day of my 19 years of teaching at UT. Even more importantly, it is a red herring, distracting us from the larger picture and the men and women behind the curtain. The fact is that the University has already been getting rid of tenure by slowly outsourcing the profession through the use of adjuncts, many of whom are full-time and most of whom shoulder high teaching loads while making less than your postal carrier or a beginning teacher in the K-12 school system. In my department, my lecturer colleagues hold a Ph.D. in English and attempt to continue their research because they love it and they know it enriches their classrooms; however, they remain ineligible for tenure. Their jobs are not structured like mine because the outsourcing of the professoriate has happened across the country over the last 20 years, reducing the number of tenure-track jobs drastically. The dismantling of the job of professor into more lecturer positions and fewer of the conventional "professorships," in other words, has already seriously eroded the principle of tenure. Let me be clear: I do not think that tenure means a job for life. It's about academic freedom, free speech, and the autonomy of the university as an institution of higher learning. I've now seen for myself how much that academic freedom matters when half of my colleagues fear for their jobs if they speak out in committees on issues about instruction, if they don't get positive student reviews (in themselves increasingly problematic surveys of what students "liked"), or if they teach material that challenges students.

The academic freedom I enjoy as a tenured professor at UT is first defined by one's responsibility

to use the freedom of his or her office in an honest, courageous, and persistent effort to search out and communicate the truth that lies in the area of his or her competence.

What, then, is the expertise I invoke here? That of an English professor, a lover of the word and seeker of truth through it, like Orwell. Orwell's passion for good writing grew from a sense of citizenship.  His 1946 "Politics and the English Language" is as chilling a read as 1984 for someone in my line of work. Orwell declares "the great enemy of clear language is insincerity." He then supports his declaration with examples of that insincerity, including the description of air-strikes on rural villages as "pacification," as well as sloppy usage, cliches, and the bloated phraseology of political and business propaganda.  I've fought and lost some of the lesser assaults on the language, like the use of "impacted." Molars are impacted; you are not "impacted" by a movie unless, somehow, the seating arrangement is so horrible that either the Jaws of Life or a gigantic dentist is necessary to get you out of your chair afterward. But I've given up on that one. "De-tenure," however, is worth fighting because of what it attempts to mask. Tenure is already on the ropes at UT, as at so many other places, because so many faculty already don't have it. My lecturer colleagues know that their employment with the university is designed to be "flexible," another Orwellian term for easy to fire.  Our situation, like most American workers in the "mobile," "lean and mean" labor force toiling beneath better "business models," is tenuous, and the message is: don't unpack. In an era of "do more with less," all this means that lecturers teach more, while tenure-line faculty are asked to publish more, provide more service to the university, and advise more students to justify their allegedly easier jobs. What I note is that both of these hamsters are running awfully fast in their wheels.

At the same time, the number of administrators, most of them much more highly paid than any faculty member, has blossomed in an era of better "business models" for universities. The organizational charts from the three main divisions of UT (the President's staff, the Chancellor's staff, and the Provost's staff) are dizzying in their complexity and do not fully represent the number of associate deans and other administrators for each of the Colleges and other units. The same Board meeting that broached the removal of tenure as a cost-saving measure began (after the invocation) with Di Pietro putting forward a statement about a new Vice President of Development and Alumni Affairs (actually, a promotion) at a salary of $307,000, before benefits, moving expenses, and an additional "non-accountable expense allowance." That figure would hire 5-6 assistant professors or 8-9 lecturers in English, depending on how you do the math, probably with change left over. Development folks are supposed to raise funds, I understand, but I have my concerns about how much of the university's resources now go to them. I also have concerns about the effectiveness of their approach, which actually cost the English department money (another story for another day). My main point is that higher administrators make great salaries, usually 3 or 4 times what tenured faculty members make and 8 to 10 times what full-time lecturers make, and their numbers and roles seem to be growing with more calls for "review," "accountability," "making hard decisions," and "better management." Call it the spread of Vice. New initiatives justify new administrators, who usually create more work (and anxiety) for teaching faculty already struggling to find the time to see to their increased responsibilities, take care of more students, and stay on top of new developments in the field.  These administrators are also no longer (as they once were) subject to any faculty oversight or review, though we do get the occasional survey about whether we "like" what they're doing.  The teaching faculty carry on, like Orwell's Boxer from Animal Farm, determined to work harder, while we await the withering away of the state. That's why listing the removal of tenure in the context of a list of money-saving and revenue-generating proposals sounded so ominous to many of us. Even if "de-tenure" was truly a typo, it was a revealing one.

Mark Burstein, President of Lawrence University and also the recipient of an MBA from the Wharton School of Business, has a thoughtful piece on the limits of "business model" thinking for higher education, in which he reflects on the ways he sees business model thinking "directly at odds" with the college experience and even the "core values" of higher education. I would like to see our administration be as thoughtful about the limits and dangers of this approach, and to look at the burden that the sprawling 3-system administrative staff places on the University budget. Let me also add that I can write this post because I have tenure. I believe it guarantees my right to speak without fear of reprisal (a right not enjoyed by many of my colleagues), and I have come to a much clearer understanding of its importance in these strange times. Here I stand; I can do no other. I boldly take issue not just with the term "de-tenure" (even though it was swiftly disappeared from the website) but with the ideas behind it: the placement of post-tenure review as an item under cost savings and, further, with the "business model" approach to higher education. If you want to find the money to finance higher education, don't look down at those who do the teaching, mentoring, service, and research, good people; look up.

Bare

One of the more amazing things about being a professor is getting an occasional glimpse of the world to come, the world that will be made by my students. Granted, sometimes I get a little apocalyptic (and apoplectic) when I think that this could be a world without the Oxford comma, proper use of the objective case, and actual books, but that's usually a sign that I need to stop grading papers and walk the dog. Sometimes, however, I experience that other sense of the term apocalypse, an unveiling. In those moments, the stars begin to fall, the planets seem to realign, and what was formerly impossible pulls up a chair, smiles, and says "guess what? That just happened." Last night, that happened. A young man named Ethan, whom I am fortunate to call my student, directed and starred in Bare: A Pop Opera, a production that is also his honors project. Written in 1999, Bare unfolds in a Catholic boarding school, where two boys have fallen in love and carry on a clandestine romance until one, Peter, decides he is no longer willing to live in the closet. The other, Jason, the school's golden boy, scared and confused, refuses to embrace their love in public and the consequences are tragic. Jason has a fling with the sexy but insecure Ivy that results in a pregnancy. Then, he ODs during a school production of Romeo and Juliet, another play about forbidden love and hidden lives that animates this one. This summary doesn't do justice to Ethan's production, but it's a sketch of what unfolded in song, American sign language, and the 15 heart-out, passionate, Katy-bar-the-door performances that simultaneously gave the play its sense of urgency and, paradoxically, marked it as a play set in the past. Faulkner once observed that the past is never dead; it's never even the past. I've always thought that insight needs the ballast of Tony Kushner's prophetic assertion that the world only spins forward. Both halves of this equation are true; without Faulkner's insight, we would be blind to the histories shape us, and without Kushner's, how would we keep going? Faulkner reminds us to honor the parts of the past that are honorable; Kushner reminds us that it's OK to ask for more.

Last night, the stars began to fall, at least in my neck of the woods. The past met the present and shook hands with the future. Let me explain. Just before the play, I was celebrating the news that a dear friend had been accepted to seminary and was in line for a substantial scholarship. Toasts would be in order under any circumstances, but this friend is gay, out, and seeking ordination in a mainline Protestant (OK, since you asked, Lutheran) tradition. Earlier that day, the Supreme Court agreed to hear cases from 4 states in the 6th Circuit, including cases from Tennessee, which will likely lead to the legal clarification of the right to marriage equality on a national scale. That means that by April of 2015, the court should hear the cases, and the issue should be resolved in June. Of this year. So as I sprang up from dinner's joyous conversation to make it to Ethan's play, the sense of moment, of history lurching forward, electrified me. During the passionate talkback after Bare, I sat next to Carol Mayo-Jenkins, whom I am honored and continually flabbergasted to call my colleague. Carol played Sherwood, the sharp, caring, dulcet-toned English teacher on Fame, and she's in my personal pantheon of real and imaginary teachers who made me want to do what I do. I pinch myself whenever I stop to think about the fact that we inhabit the same office building and dote on the same students. Together, we listened to these young actors talk about why this show mattered so much to them, how close their own stories were to their characters', how they struggled to believe that they could be loved by God when their churches rejected them, how many of their parents refused to come to the show, how intertwined we are in the past, and how we can taste the future.

My own high school years in the early 80s were days in which, even in a relatively artsy high school, people weren't "out." It was a far cry from the 50s, which kept the likes of Rock Hudson in the closet, but it was still a world before Gay-Straight Alliances, PFLAG, and trans awareness. What we had in that post-Stonewall, pre-ACT UP moment were the arts, and shows on TV like Fame, which let us dream about moving to New York, attending a school for the arts, living, dancing, singing, and writing with fiery passion. It gave us (all of us--kids who were gay, straight, who knows yet?) a glimpse into a world that looked more tolerant, more creative, and more open-minded than the one we inhabited, one in which we might be loved and appreciated for our freaky gifts and quirks. Fame did, in reality, lead to the creation of hundreds of schools for the arts across the country. Oscar Wilde got his revenge: more often than we realize, life imitates art. My mundane south Florida public high school, an architectural wasteland further scarred by portable classrooms, overcrowding, and double sessions, had none of the charm of the 46th St. High School for the Performing Arts, but at least we had a chorus room and a tiny drama program to bring together the odd ducks, smart kids, and performative types. That last group included several boys who knew or came to realize later that they were gay. And I loved them--great prom dates, fantastic singers, hilarious, affectionate, classy, but, alas for me, not straight. Some made it through, and some we lost in the 90s to the scourge of AIDS. In the middle of those in-between times, though, in 1983 (and thereabouts), we had chorus, The Music Man, and our shared passion for making the most beautiful and meaningful disposable art we could, being as honest and brave as we could, and knowing something more about ourselves and each other as a result.

For many of the kids I knew, the arts were what saved them. And that's likely to remain true, even if the Supreme Court affirms the right to marry that 36 states now recognize. Bare was about the urgent need for the arts and especially for theatre as a space of imagining what we can't yet fully realize, for encountering ideas and issues with an audience that otherwise might not be willing or able to have that conversation, and for glorying in the painful, beautiful, complicated process of being and loving in this imperfect world. These kids were leaning in to their own futures, and sitting next to one of my childhood idols who mapped out territory that helped give my friends hope, territory I would later claim as my own when I decided to teach, I knew that their work mattered. Bless them for it. As sister Chantelle sings in the show, God don't make no trash. Sing loud, lead on, and don't ever apologize for who you are. Non-judgment day is coming.

Eat the Omelet

This Christmas morning, I woke with what looked like a lovely bit of time before creatures were stirring.  I live in the House of Teen, and I thought 10:00 AM would be early for them. While I was wrong about that one, I did get about an hour for the coffee infusion, the comfy chair, and time with the dog, Emma, who was gratifyingly calm and soft this Christmas morn. I was thinking about a post my wise friend Nerissa Nields wrote on Christmas Eve.  She said

There's a reason that the medieval English celebrated these 12 days as some kind of grand reversal, with the Lord of Misrule at the helm (borrowed from the old Roman festival of Saturnalia), and all sorts of indecent liberties taken. It's too much to take in, all this darkness, but at the center of it all is the great gift of the coming of the light in the form of a new baby, hope, a way out, a way home. So we spend too much, drink too much, eat too much, sometimes say too much. We can't contain all the feelings. But if we can stop for a moment, sit still and take it in...that's where the real present is...

So, at her kind reminder, I stopped and dropped in, warming my feet with a real live dog in my snug house and letting my heart melt. The presents glittered their infinite potential in shiny unbroken paper shells; the lights blurred gently as I fumbled for my glasses, and the sun snuck up over the fence of the world. I could just reach the Mary Oliver collection of poems, Dog Stories, on the adjacent table, and I read Emma "Little Dog's Rhapsody in the Night" in the silent language of dog lovers who know they know our minds:

"Tell me you love me," he says

 "Tell me again."

Could there be a sweeter arrangement?

Over and over

he gets to ask.

I get to to tell.

My pause turned into my new favorite yoga pose, "fluffy house booties reclining with dog and coffee" pose, in which you stretch out and rhythmically scratch the dog's head with each breath, contemplating the happy circuit of love from dog to human. The endless petitions for love that make more love work so well with dogs, yet somehow, in the arrangements of family and extended family, not so much.

This sacred morning quiet could not be a shield against the mixed set of experiences of the day, the ways that Christmas light in the darkness includes, well, the darkness, but it did provide a little emergency footrest if I could remember to use it. Because Christmas, let's face it, is a mixture of experiences, of great joy and hope, the memory of love, loss, pain, and death. Spend a little time with someone who has lost a truly loved one in the last year and this will become clear, no matter how much tinsel, egg nog, and fa la la la la you throw at them. And by the way, don't throw things. Then there are less extreme, less obviously devouring kinds of loss, disappointment, and annoyance that haunt and deflate us. These are everybody's problems. I have come to the opinion that anyone who says their joy isn't mingled with tears and sorrows is either lying or is 3. The human condition is such that by the time you are invited to the adult's table (heck, by the time you are in big girl pants) some grief creep has started.

For some of us, it's the little irritation that has become, over time, an actual wound. The source of it was the little speck of sand we failed to turn into a pearl. Now it's an icky rash, sensitive to all touch. Sianne Ngai calls them the "ugly feelings," the petty emotions that have to do with our sense of powerlessness and frustration.  Sometimes it's our plans gone awry (or even the secret hopes we didn't quite consolidate into a plan) that become a huge, sprawling, sticky mess oozing into other people's lives. But there are corresponding moments of grace that meet these ugly feelings, like when a partner, who knows all the fights by heart and can go as many rounds as you can, finds you on the third verse of your favorite tune "I Feel Like Shit and It's Your Fault." Imagine the evil musical twin  Cole Porter's "You're the Top" and you've got it. But instead of joining in (it's a duet, after all), the beloved pauses. Smiles. Listens. Does not react. Said partner even waits just the right number of seconds to let you shift emotional gears before the hug, and stands there in the middle of the mess as its inky tide begins to recede.

If none of that sounds very Christmas-y, let's come back to those presents, the ones glittering in their paper shells. They are visual reminders of what we asked for, what we wished we'd asked for, the unknown hopes others have for us, the things we wish for the ones we love, the way others see us. Sometimes, the presents are not what we (or they) wanted. Sometimes, they are. But they are about to be, in just a few minutes, a beautiful mess. Hopefully, we will revel in the chaos, suspending the urge to grab the garbage bag and clean up long enough to watch faces and experience our own joys and griefs, pretty and ugly feelings, all being swirled together at a higher velocity than usual because our hearts are with the people who matter the most to us.

The eggs of our life don't unscramble. Yet the mind inclines to mastery (or perhaps that's just panic in a fancy dress) so much that we waste time imagining how we could unscramble them, how to unstir our stirred selves, undo the irritations and the bad choices, all the while regarding with contempt the familiarity of our own glorious and mysterious lives. If I had a dollar for every time I've let myself be sucked into the "if only" vortex, I'd have enough money to pay for the 24/7 massage therapists, the house cleaning staff, and the psychiatrist I convince myself I need because I've made such a mad, sticky, messy omelet of things. FaceBook can make it worse by presenting the illusion that other people have it all together or that other people's families are perfect and yours is weird.  But it's a great big Lacanian mirror stage ruse in which the baby in the mirror is always cooler, more together, and more capable than we are. Other people's omelets look shiny and perfect from a distance.

Let's face it, my fellow omelet-makers, we all have egg on our faces, even if some remember to wipe it off in public.  And all these omelets are a good thing, because people get hungry. My omelet of a life, made of leftovers, time, and love, it's pretty damn tasty. Christmas didn't end yesterday; it just got started. If my feet are cold, I can warm them with a dog. My emergency footrest will be there if I just remember to meditate, even if I'm doing it, in the words of Anne Lamott, like a meth-head squirrel. I'm going to screw some things up, I'll say too much, and I'll break a few eggs. But there is still a little coffee in the pot, and I'm taking the day off.  Merry first day of Christmas, to all.

Good morning, Chaos. Sit down

Today I welcomed chaos into my life, and it was, well, better than I thought it would be. You may have heard the Chaos Muppet/Order Muppet theory of all personality. This is the theory in which we are all Bert or Ernie (or Kermit or Animal, choose your weapon) and that the sooner we understand this about ourselves and others, the better. Corollary 1 of this theory is that the Chaos Muppet should always drive (because the Order Muppet will give directions and, God forbid, should the Order Muppet be driving and need directions, the Chaos Muppet will DO IT WRONG and then bad things will happen. Very bad things. Name calling and fuming are the tip of the iceberg.  You seem like a pretty smart reader, so you've probably surmised by now that I am among the Order Muppets, the people who make trains run on time, find other people's lost keys, and figure out how to get seven impossible things done before breakfast. Being an Order Muppet is not the same as being a neat freak, mind you (cf, my desk) but it does mean that we live in a world of to do lists, created by brains that don't just keep calendars but have become one with them. These calendar brains are the matrix and the shield, the Very Efficient Person's Prophylactic against any unruly little feelings that might lead to disruption, change, or something else that won't fit in the boxes. They should probably add VEPP to the Myers-Briggs chart that tracks the coping mechanisms of all those acronyms, especially the weirdos with the Is and Fs and Ps.

So when I say that I welcomed chaos into my life today, I am using "today" in the specific sense of morning, and to be more precise, 1:30 AM, when it literally came into the house.  I woke to two voices, and thought perhaps my older son, who had just arrived home from college earlier that night, was up talking to my husband. It even could have been his "little" brother, who is now taller than I am and becoming a basso faster than you can say "holy hormone blast, Bat Man." The voices weren't necessarily cause for alarm. We do tag-team insomnia in this house, so who knows who might be on the couch reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead, playing Skyrim, stringing a bow and arrow, or looking for cookies at 1:30 in the morning.  With four on deck, all permutations can be simultaneously true some night-mornings. But this time, the voices belonged to my husband and Mr. Chaos, who had knocked on the door roughly half an hour earlier when my husband, bless him, answered.  I'll call him Mr. Chaos because I just adore this kid and have known him a long time, enough to know that his true name is Mr. Chaos. It's been a rocky road for him, and tonight's rock came in the form of a car wreck. (This is a case where the Chaos Muppet shouldn't drive, at least not without an Order Muppet on deck.) And this is also why a hysterical young man off his meds with a fresh traffic violation showed up at our door at 1:30, phone and keys Goddess knows where, car towed to East Egypt. TN, where believe me, you do not want to hear banjo music.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  None of that was really worth processing yet, because it was all the raw emotional chaos, the kind of thing I do not do or witness electively. This kid was spewing the panic, fear, hatred, self-loathing, and deep weariness that, not to be a Debbie Downer, we know is inside all of us. Mr. Chaos was doing all he could do to stay in his skin while it was all coming up, like vomit (and while we're on the subject, thank you, Mr. Chaos, for not actually vomiting on my stuff). My husband was great, listening, responding a little, calming where he could, and mostly, being there. (In case you haven't guessed this part yet, my husband is the Chaos Muppet in our relationship, though most days, his muppetude plays out on a manageable scale). Mr. Chaos had gotten loud enough to wake me where the knock did not, and that's when I came down. More listening, more chances to practice what Brene Brown describes as real empathy, which means taking his perspective, not judging, recognizing the other's emotions, and connecting with them. I'm not saying either one of us did it right, and I can't properly explain how I stumbled my way to something like empathy with Mr. Chaos, but it meant I had to feel with him, take his crazy, disorienting perspective, and just sit with it all. NOT my strong suit, as my superpower is that I can fix everything. And I will, so you better just go ahead and get the freak out of my way while I order your life for you.  But this was going to be about something else, because even with my superpower, I was both pretty sure I couldn't fix this one, and, more to the point, that fixing it wasn't the point of what was happening in this surreal space, which also happened to be my couch.  So, I tried to sit, to listen, without judgment. And you know what? I mostly did. It was totally wild, scary, and it also felt like I was doing something that I was very, very much supposed to be doing. And you know what else? I got back to sleep after it (a huge victory for a farm-league insomniac), as did Mr. Chaos. We covered him up with blankets, found him a pillow, kissed him on the forehead, and lo, sleep found him. Then, in the morning, we went about the thinking work of figuring out what happens next, what baby steps should and can only come after coffee, some eggs, and a shower. This surprisingly calm morning after, as it turned out, was GREAT time for me to use my superpower, but in a different way than I usually do.  Believe it or not, some people find my superpower off-putting. Even when it is operating at the peak of its wonderful efficiency, others have responded to me as though I am invading their space, judging, running their lives for them, giving unsolicited advice, or even being a bit of a bitch.  These people obviously have problems, which is precisely what I was trying to tell them in the first place, and if they had just held still and let me do everything....but I digress. Instead, this morning, the elemental functions of the superpower were sitting there, looking pretty useful as individual elements of support. Turns out, everyone in my house also possessed superpowers and found a way to use in a nicely concerted effort (insert small back pat here) while still letting someone else pull their own pants on themselves. Finding phone numbers, loaning a phone, encouraging a call to the shrink, giving a ride to the impounded car. And lo and behold, Mr. Chaos made it to his shift on time, which means that the rock of job loss is not going through what's left of his windshield today.

Now, it's just a few moments before my dear friends arrive for Thanksgiving. Somehow, the house is ready enough, the pies will still get made, takeout tonight seems like a stroke of hot-damn genius, and my heart is full and humming.  Thank you, Mr. Chaos. I think you're awesome and I am so glad you came to visit. Let the holidays begin.

Masquerade and Civilization

Over the course of a very busy weekend conference meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, that scholarly society had a ball.  Literally.  The Masquerade ball was the first of its kind, hosted by a small group of women from the Women's Caucus as a fundraiser for our scholarships and prizes for independent scholars and lecturers, graduate students, and those working on translations or editions. All these groups tend to be long on talent and short on cash. The event was an overwhelming financial success, thanks to the generosity of many donors, big and small, and the scrappy efforts of the organizing committee and volunteers who sold lottery tickets, masks, eye-patches, wigs, costumes, photo booth privileges, and admission tickets that evening. We should be able to fund our scholarship prizes for the next seven years. These are small amounts of money, but they make the difference between being able to go to a research library to look at documents, or to afford illustrations for your book, or not. It is an accomplishment that will have lasting, material effects in the lives of gifted scholars among us.

Financial success is, as ever, nice. But having my heart warmed, indeed, deeply moved by the energy and joy of so many brilliant minds gathered to celebrate each other and our shared interests took that evening outside the circuits of exchange, irreducible to values and equivalencies. Priceless. It was, for me, one of those rare moments of pure flow, presence, and communion with others. The collective I.Q. and knowledge in that room threatened to blow off the roof at any moment. That may sound like a mystical description of a dance party, but it's true. Ask anyone who was there. I saw (and all parties shall remain nameless) Mary Wollstonecraft, a Methodist minister from the cover of my last book, Belinda from Pope's The Rape of the Lock, and a full head-to-toe domino out on the dance floor.  I saw King Charles II with his spaniel shaking it to Rihanna and the Jackson 5 (this alone qualifies as a Christmas miracle). I saw handsome men in crushed velvet suits, in bright silk topcoats with lace, masked and unmasked.  I saw gorgeous women with powdered wigs rising 2 feet into the air, graceful in their watered silks, tiny-waisted, big-skirted, bolsters brushing on the dance floor as these visions, brilliant inside and out, laughed together. I saw graduate students, senior scholars, junior scholars, with their eyes all aglow because we took this leap together, bringing fantastic period clothes and other costumes along with our usual staid professional duds, packing lace and furbelows beneath the copies of our lectures and flattened by our laptops, and setting aside one night to enjoy the fact that we love the things we study and the privilege of studying them together.

Usually, Beyoncé isn't a part of that conversation, but that night, she was. The music, provided by a team of fantastic volunteer DJs (hey, this was a fundraiser on a shoestring budget--we even strong-armed the hotel into giving us the dance floor for free), moved from Telemann, Mozart, and Handel at the very beginning to Annie Lennox, Devo, Cyndi Lauper, then Pitbull, Scissor Sisters, and beyond. When those of us who organized the event were first making our plans, we wondered if anyone would come, and then, if they would dance, dress up, or participate at all. Let's just say that after a point, if you wanted space on that dance floor, you had to be pretty determined.  Hands went up in the air both because DJ Lauren was spinning Macklemore and Lewis and because, well, we could squeeze in more people that way. When we tried to make Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" a last song, it turned into a gigantic, throat-ripping sing-along performed by the best minds of my generation. But unlike Ginsburg's, they were refusing to be destroyed by the madness of our times: the attacks on higher education that describe the humanities as elitist or partisan and undercut our ability to educate the rising generations; the shrinking budgets that outsource the professoriate, tenure's quiet vanishing act; the difficulty of teaching our students to read the great novels, poems, plays, and essays of the past that will make them better critical thinkers, especially when they write about them with clarity and grace.

You could look at this night and say "sounds like a bunch of geeky academics having the prom they missed in high school." Go ahead; we made the same joke ourselves. But hear this as well: we were (and are) gorgeous, graceful, and fierce in the cause of a joy that comes from the life of the mind lived for the love of teaching and learning. And our feet hurt. But we'd do it all again in a heartbeat.