So glad we bought a snowblower last week!

 By the time I took the brand new "snow blower" out for its test run, seven inches of very wet snow had fallen. It is called a "quitanieves" in Spanish or "souffleuse de neige" in French, according to the trilingual manual. I got it on sale last week, fifty dollars less than today.

 I was thrilled! It did a great job of shooting the snow over to the side ( your turn a little crank to redirect the spout), and cleared the sidewalks down to the last half inch, but there was so much water in the snow that I had to use a shovel to hack up the stuff that was packed down by pedestrians. Still a workout to haul it around without running over the extension cord (special! for super-cold temps!), but I got the hang of it really fast. It's easy to use, and I don't have to worry about gas. The snow is still falling, and they are predicting 14" total by tomorrow morning's commute. I'll be doing it all again in the morning, but at least I won't be trying to move over a foot of wet snow, which would surely burn out the belt in no time.

A Snow Emergency has been declared, so parking restrictions go into place. In Minneapolis, for those of us without garages, this means the dance of odd/even sides of the street. If you don't move your car correctly during the time frames, you WILL be towed and it will cost a lot of money and take at least half a day to get your car back.

 My first snow tow, several years ago now, required a three-hour wait in a line at -11 degrees, so that by the time I got to pay my fine, I had to pee so badly I almost didn't make it home in time. NEVER AGAIN. Even with my butt-ugly Sorel boots that I bought in 1988 when I moved here, a full-length down coat with a hood, a wool hat, muffler and double ragg-wool mittens, I was miserable in that line

Tomorrow, I'll also have to shovel out  the garbage and recycling bins aren't so they won't be behind a snow berm in the alley, that will freeze and be there for the rest of the winter.

UPDATED TO ADD: 15" total,  and I"m so glad it shoveled the first 7" yesterday. It made today's job so much easier. But there is not getting around the fact that shoveling the snow away from the garbage and recycling bins, without getting it in the alley, is freakin' hard work.  It is one good way to meet your neighbors, though.

Someone made this nifty little song to help remember where to move your car and when.

Change is good

This week, I made a big decision. It will take along time to put into action, but in my gut it feels right. I'm going to let go of a dream that has been dead for a long time now. I'm very fortunate that the change I'm going to make can be done slowly, and in a way that shelters me from uncertainty, but it will be a big change. Looking back, I realize that I have been working hard in the last few years to make positive changes, but the paths I followed were dead ends. It's time to cut it all loose.

No more gnashing of teeth, no more chasing my tail, no more struggling, mired in the Slough of Despond. It exhausts me; it is dreary, and boring, and it could go on forever while I sink in over my head, every semester, and gasp and drown and flail.

I hereby declare that my war on reality is over. I surrender, and I'm going to move on. I have tried valiantly, and then foolishly, to change things I cannot change. (Because it wasn't FAIR!) They are not going to change. I, on the other hand, have changed, and need to make change, for the better. I'm must try to move forward  from possibility instead of fear. The fears have not gone away, but now I also feel a sense of certainty that I have always trusted in the past. This feels right.

Already, I am flooded with relief and eagerness for the future. At the same time, I'm humbled to recognize that I have choices that most people won't have. I can't, I won't let fear prevent me from making them.

Small steps.
I'm taking a medical leave to regroup, rest, recover. I'm leaning on my medical team: changing medications, working to find the right therapist, doing my spiritual homework.
So much clutter. It's time to cut it loose.

Argle Bargle

One step out the door. I'm requested a medical leave today, something I should probably have done two months ago when I fell into the Slough of Despond *shudder*

Maybe I put it off because the round of paperwork, phone calls, and permission is so daunting,  argle bargle. I have been waiting two months  (TWO MONTHS) for a medical appointment with a specialist because the only way to be seen any sooner would have been to check myself into a hospital. Which I very seriously considered, but then I decided to hold out as long as I could.

Is it an omen that when I got home the cat had barfed on the bathmat and peed on a blanket in his basket on the porch? I think I need to take him to the vet, poor baby.

Moving back into Folwell Hall!

Eighteen months ago we packed up our department offices and moved into temporary space while Folwell Hall was being gutted and reconfigured. My department has moved from the grotty, filthy, vermin-infested basement to a clean, quiet second floor. My new office faces south and for the first time in 22 years,  I will have an office with  natural light, decent climate control, no noise from crowds students sitting on the floor in the halls waiting for class, no noise from chairs being rearranged overhead, no grit and dirt tracked in all winter, a bathroom that is not used by hundreds of other people during that day. It's sinking in that I'll have an office I actually will be able to enjoy working in! What a concept. It feels as if I have received a promotion or a raise.  The foundation and exterior had already been redone some years ago. Check out this cool slideshow to see the exterior of the building with some fun architectural details that were preserved or restored.




The quality of my work life has been incredibly improved. The moving process itself, the packing and unpacking, is time-consuming, but stimulating. Once again I am confronted by the sheer volume of STUFF I am dragging around and that is cluttering up my space, and my brain.This time, the purge must be complete and merciless!


One unexpected consequence has hit me this week. I feel, for the first time in ages, excited about writing again. I feel as if I can contemplate making a commitment to writing without dread and panic. Writing on this blog is one step. Writing in my work life, which I have avoided in unhealthy ways for too long, is the next.

There's nothing like moving 22 years worth of papers and books twice in 18 months to make one confront the gap between intentions and action. As I shelved my books, I got excited about the projects some of them represent. More to the point, there is no room in my new, lovely office for more than four drawers of paper files, and no files are allowed to live at home. My goal in the next few weeks is to sort through the contents of all these boxes (15! 15!!!) and recycle what I will never use again or SCAN those I want to keep.

Which pile will include papers I wrote in graduate school? those articles I painstakingly tracked down using the enormous card catalogue, running up and down nine flights of stairs in the UC Berkeley library, paying to photocopy them and carefully placing each page so nothing was cut off? the sheer amount of labor devoted to collecting this material over the years is an obstacle to blithely tossing it in the recycle bin. And I HAVE used a lot of this material, for writing or classes. So now, in this brief interlude before classes begin, it's a good time to open each box, sort things into piles, and work up a righteous buzz of recycling anything that I have not touched in ten years, and will not read or use for a writing project. That will force me to decide which of the many abandoned writing projects are still viable, and which ones need to be released into the wild.

Work speed-up!

Lately, my work life has reminded me of the famous scene of Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory. ("Speeeed it up!")

Things start to move at a faster clip. Can I maintain the serenity of these two corgis on their treadmill?


Or will I slip off while someone snickers, as is the case with these kitties?

Collaboration on my treadmill can be fun!


I would love to learn this routine.

Remedy for the sads

Yesterday I faced one of the tougher situations I've ever had to deal with as a teacher. I won't go into the details because I don't talk about my students on this blog, but let's just say that I think I handled it OK, but it left me feeling profoundly sad for all involved and really disappointed in myself for not having seen the warning signs more clearly. I did the best I could yesterday, but I'm spending some time in the next few weeks trying to figure out what I could have done differently or better, even though I recognize that when people behave badly, sometimes there is nothing I can do to prevent it.

To cheer myself up as I head into my grading marathon, I'm sharing with you these amazing parrot videos. The bird is Lolita, and her friend peachy525 has clearly taught her well, starting with the simplest of songs, and building up to more complicated ones. ("you forgot "gently down the stream!") Lolita even freestyles at the end, clearly a happy and well-loved bird.

Then.. there is this: Lolita's rendition of the alternative metal band Drowning Pool's "Let the Bodies Hit the Floor"-- a song that gets used for a lot of youtube remixes. The vocal is by Dave Williams, the band's first singer, who died of heart disease after the first album was released. Lolita's version is going viral even as we speak. my favorite part? the way "nothing's wrong with me" seems to change to "nothing cockatoo" LOL!

There. I feel better now.

The jaded mentor

This one is making the rounds of the higher ed blogs and even sites like mefi. I should note that none of this is new. When I started grad school in Comp Lit in 1980, there were no jobs. I don't see that the situation has actually changed that much, just shifted.

So you want to get a PhD in the Humanities?



But don't despair! the "practical" professions have their own versions.
So you want to be a lawyer?

Epic office move!

My building is finally going to be renovated! Twenty-two years worth of books, files, and office supplies had to be sorted, recycled or packed in two days this week for the move from our building (which will be gutted and remodeled) to "swing space" in another building for 18 months. I'm so happy for the remodel because the outside of our building is quite grand, but the innards were either too hot or too cold, and there was no adequate way to regulate temperatures in classrooms without excessive noise.

So over the last few days, I packed rolling bookshelves and large plastic boxes on dollies with books, the files I did not recycle, and the assorted stuff one has in an office. I found about a million paper clips and pennies. I have no idea how many books I have, but I do know that I recycled the equivalent of two four-drawer file cabinets and ten file boxes worth of paper. About half of the furniture will go to the ReUse Center. I probably kept enough paper files to fill one of the file cabinets and four boxes. The act of sorting and tossing all these files into the huge recycling bin was a kind of "this is your life" in fast-motion: here were the articles I had painstakingly sought and copied in libraries, the drafts of talks, the student papers that had never been picked up, the class material that I had never managed to file. So much is now digitized or available online that it is no longer necessary to keep all of this. yet, so much is still not available online that I did keep what seemed useful or important. And I couldn't bring myself to toss out the files for all my graduate classes--for sentimental value.

I experienced a rush of contradictory feelings while I was sorting through this paper trail of my professional life: pleasure at finding useful and interesting things I'd forgotten I had, disappointment at the projects that never made it past the research phase, a mix of tenderness and exasperation at my previous selves as they appear in the notes in the margins or scrawled labels. I resisted the temptation to read every file as I opened it: keep or toss? I can read it after I unpack and refile, reshelve, reorganize all these things in the new space.

This video is a fairly accurate representation of the process, but I went on to clear my bookshelves and box everything up.


Starting tomorrow and through Wednesday, the movers will roll these things across the street to the building where we will be for the next eighteen months. My temporary office has a window (yay) but is painted a hideous shade of sickly blue. I am slightly panicky about this because color affects my mood in a big way, butI will see how it looks once all the furniture is in, and art is on the walls. I figure I can live with it if I decorate. I'm quite happy to be located in a suite of offices that share a common space that we can furnish as a lounge, and that my suite-mates are all my favorite colleagues (our administrative assistant was very savvy about allocating the space!). We have already agreed to share a couch, table, some chairs, a microwave, coffee-maker, etc. I can imagine a very congenial atmosphere. I will no longer have an office next door to the person who has been the most unpleasant to me over the last two decades, and will no longer have to close the door to keep out the noise of busy hallway traffic.

The packing itself was a physical challenge for my fibromyalgia, and I'm dealing with a huge flare-up, but it will pass. This process feels good. I had been meaning to do a kind of clean-up like this for years, and the moved forced it to happen.
Julie Morgenstern, whose organizing ideas are the best I've read, talks about her process for getting rid of stuff and changing your life! SHED your stuff, change your life.
S-Separate the Treasures: what could I not imagine living without?
H-Heave the rest: purge, recycle, get rid of it.
E-Embrace your Identity From Within (wall of panic: who am I without all my stuff?)
D-Drive yourself forward: move toward the new life. by trying something entirely new.

Busy work day

My daughter has been away from home for one week now. I miss her so much. But I am busy, busy, busy!

It's not as if I don't have lots to distract me: it's the second week of classes, filled with department meetings, graduate students conferences, directed study projects, committee business, class prep, fiddling with online classroom support platforms. I also have to prepare a multi-media presentation for an event next week, and I have some papers to revise for presentation in April. But I have declared today "catch up on paper work day." I have summarize the building's financial business for our tax returns, do renters credit forms, a faculty activities report, update my CV, and file about six months worth of bills. If I can do this before I have coffee with a friend by 3:30, I will reward myself by going out dancing tonight. I haven't been dancing for almost two years! The sun is shining, the kitty is warm, and I can watch Season 2 of Dexter while I file, so life is good.

"Busy work"+ YouTube got me this priceless item.

One reason why I like my job

When I work with students on their Senior Projects for their last class in our department's major, my role is primarily that of guide and facilitator for the students' efforts. Yes, there are many things I teach them about doing research, writing, editing an academic paper in Spanish, both in groups and in one-on-one session. Sometimes I even get to work with students whose interests coincide with my areas of expertise. But quite often I am helping connect them with other experts, and I learn a great deal from their projects. In most cases, students choose topics that fit with their double majors, their career plans, their experience studying abroad, and their personal relationships (sometimes via marriage). Many of the topics are ones that come up almost every semester, so I've now learned quite a bit about them!

Topics this semester include:

• Myths and facts about Mexican immigration to Minnesota, using the case of Lake Street as an immigrant neighborhood, historically and today;
  
• Américo Paredes and the relationship between his fiction, poetry and research as a founding figure of Chicano studies;
  
• the exhumation of mass graves in Spain today, comparing the case of García Lorca to that of someone not famous, but whose burial on the church threshold was a symbol of repression in the village;
• Sarmiento's novel Facundo, its ideological contradictions, and their relationship to present-day Argentine social tensions;
  
• The situation of Spanish-speaking people seeking health care in the Twin Cities: insurance access, language, and cultural difference as issues in inequality for basic medical care, and another study centered on physical therapy:inventory of resources, identification of problems, possible solutions;
  
• current discourses on discrimination against Nicaraguan migrants in Costa Rica, comparing academic sources and popular discourse in blogs, press, and other online sites;
• the use of "language brokering" or informal translation by children in K-8 classroom at a school in Minneapolis: what research has to say and what the teachers see;
• examining how relationship between traditional ideas about motherhood and polticial activism for Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina through the films "The Official Story" and "Cautiva";
• Issues of literacy in Spanish for adult learners of English;
• how the maquiladora system on the U.S. Mexican border affects the women who work there, and the documentary film Maquilapolis's representation of that situation;
• What we are able to know about Aztec society before the arrival of the Spanish expeditions, and how we have to evaluate various sources in light of colonialism;
• what we should know about the different paths of Cuba and Puerto Rico after the Spanish-American War 1898 as roots of present-day situations;
• the uses of the iconic image of the Virgin of Guadalupe by Mexicans and others in the U.S., in art and popular culture, and how it works to signify different kinds of relationships in different contexts.
• Portuguese-language poetry in Angola, and the use of the trope of mother Africa in the emergence of discourses about identity during and after Independence struggles.
  

Zoning out on the couch, yes I am!

Churning through stuff at work in a very satisfactory way, but now I'm zonked, eating leftovers and zoning out on the couch. Zoning out is good for you, yes it is! (OMG, Mary Murphy has infected me with her verbal tics!)

This was the most exciting week of So You Think You Can Dance this season, with three or four performances that were among the best ever (Mia's piece for Kayla and Kupono, Brandon and Janette's Argentine Tango AND their number for Wade) and a solo by Ade that tore the roof off. Wade Robson made this wonderful piece for Brandon and Janette, to Roisin Murphy's song "Ruby Blue." "You are two thieves" he told them, and they ran with it.

@ Yahoo! Video

Several of us had fun trying to guess which 80s song Mandy Moore would use in her choreography, because she almost always uses 80s music. We didn't guess right, but one of the bands that got mentioned was Adam and the Ants. Wow, that brought back some memories!



Adam and the Ants "Stand and Deliver" sure as heck must have been one of the inspirations for Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow!

Another song that came us was New Order's "True Faith" and it turns out that the video (1987) is wild!

Course prep done!

Map from here.
I finished creating a course site for the class I'm teaching this summer: our department's Senior Seminar. I'll have fifteen students who will each be writing a 2o-page research paper in Spanish on a topic of his or her choice. We meet together for the kinds of general things we need to do, and I meet individually with each student 3 times during the class to talk about their projects in progress. Because it's the summer, they have 8 weeks instead of 15 to finish, but one hopes that they will not have any other classes or too much work at the same time.

I enjoy teaching this class because there is a great sense of satisfaction for the students in having finished their projects, their majors and their University degrees. I learn a lot from the projects as well. It can be a combination of boot-camp and hand-holding, but after so many years of doing this, I have tried to build in as much structure as possible so there are no surprises.

When my daughter goes to college, what will she find?

Professor Zero dixit:
"Real conditions are that we are either hot members of the Academic Industrial Complex with hobbies of our choice, or tutors to the privileged classes with hobbies of our college’s choice, or activists in popular education with hobbies resembling the day jobs of hot members of the Academic Industrial Complex."
I will be thinking about this as I grade, as I write my paper for the MLA, and as I prepare my classes for spring, knowing that only 1/10 of the searches in our college can go forward, leaving many positions unfilled, departments that are already understaffed falling farther behind. In the short and long term, the politics of disinvestment in higher education promoted by our current governor and legislature (because they can't override his veto) have made the conditions of work at my institution--for staff, students and faculty--more difficult. Paying for college at our state's land-grant university without leaving with at least $25,000 in debt, has become an unreachable goal for many. Our fiscal realities are completely and utterly at odds with the professed goals of our administration.
In other words, we can either think big and meet the challenges, or we can collectively continue to advance blindly as if this were still the 20th century.

Friday, yay!

LOL!
Poor Obamaholics are going through campaign withdrawal (via the Onion).



Survived a curriculum committee meeting, a faculty meeting, and managed to eat lunch! Now I'm going to cruise the Twitter updates because I'm finding that it's a great place to get news, like my customized RSS feed.

First stop: kottke.org where he has some "Obama bits and loose ends" including an amazing video made with all the newspaper front page announcements of Obama's victory . Cool work!

"The O-list" (via MnIndy) is the New Republic's list of thirty people who will influence Obama or be part of his inner circle. Its a fascinating story of how the Obama campaign succeeded in creating its own center of power:

Simply put, the president-elect has led a revolution within the Democratic Party, replacing an establishment long dominated by Clintonites--and, more recently, by progressive bloggers and billionaires--with a new establishment, one constructed in his own ubiquitous image. This list represents our attempt at making sense of the new hierarchy--your guide to the men and women who will dominate progressive politics in the Age of Obama.

Consider the source for spin, but the analysis looks juicy!

How do we get the official Change.Gov site to meet up with with Change.org? Change.groovg?

Must end with schadenfruedelicious Palin jokes, via Mock,Paper, Scissors: Letterman's top 10

"Best" Quixote translation?

My mother is reading Don Quixote in English with one of her reading groups, and asked me what I knew about different translations. I had to reply that I knew nothing, as I had read it in Spanish, and had never had the occasion to think about "the best translation" before. I started poking around (hey, the Wikipedia entry is good!)and after looking at some scholarly and not-so-scholarly discussions of the history and quality of the very many English translations, I decided that the one her group is reading (the Edith Grossman translation with Alan Bloom's introduction) is probably, in fact, the best for their purposes; it is not a scholarly edition with footnotes explaining every proverb and reference and arguing with past translators' versions, but it is a accurate, and most importantly, a lively and FAITHFUL translation that captures the tone and spirit of the work. Here is what Edith Grossman herself says about translating literary texts (she has translated many Latin America authors, including Gabriel García Márquez):

Fidelity is surely our highest aim, but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation. Let me insist on the obvious: Languages trail immense, individual histories behind them, and no two languages, with all their accretions of tradition and culture, ever dovetail perfectly. They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is disingenuous to assume that either translation or photography, or acting for that matter, are representational in any narrow sense of the term. Fidelity is our noble purpose, but it does not have much, if anything, to do with what is called literal meaning. A translation can be faithful to tone and intention, to meaning. It can rarely be faithful to words or syntax, for these are peculiar to specific languages and are not transferable.

Why a new translation, when several were made right after its publication? Well, because English has changed a lot in 400 years, and Cervantes is, above all, a modern writer, and reading the original is an experience of great pleasure.
Without having looked at any of the texts myself it seems to me as if Grossman has done two important things: rendered the text in English that is colloquial and accessible, and captured the tone and multiples voices of Cervantes' text. Many people also had great praise for the audiobook read by Guidall.
Wikimedia has a lot of images of Don Quixote including the wonderful series of illustratioins by Gustave Doré.

Here's an interview with Edith Grossman
on translating Cervantes.

Only ten more to go!

After I turn in my grades Hurray! I'm done! Now I'm going to read this Slate special issue on procrastination.

Graduating with the Marx brothers

The semester isn't over until I have turned in my grades, but as I was walking around yesterday, I saw folks dressed in their graduation robes. Good luck to all of them! I never walked through any of my university graduations, too bad (although I did participate in other rituals. But I have sat on the stage for various graduation ceremonies in my hot robes, and I always do two things: look at the students' shoes, and get teary-eyed and sentimental.

Here's my favorite graduation scence from the movies: The Marx Brothers in Horsefeathers. Groucho sings "I'm against it"


Also from Horsefeathers,"What's the password?"


Getting off the boat in "Night at the Opera"

"You've got to sing one of Maurice Chevalier's songs to get off this boat"

The Marx Brothers play an crucial role in Hannah and her Sisters with "Hail Fredonia"

Strike by AFSCME employees at the University of Minnesota

AFSCME employees at the University are on strike for a living wage. I completely support the strike; while faculty and administrators (especially those at the highest levels) have had raises over the past four years, clerical and medical workers have actually lost money due to the fact that costs of health care benefits have eaten up the miserly wage raises they have had, not to mention inflation. They are not paid enough for the work they do, and it is obscene that the University has the money to build a new football stadium, but not to give a very modest increase to its lowest-paid workers, despite the fact that the legislature targeted money in its last allocation for that purpose.

STRIKE INFORMATION FLYER (prepared by faculty to support union workers)

Who is AFSCME?

The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Locals 3260, 3800, 3801 and 3937 represent 3,500 clerical, technical and health care workers at the University of MN.

These are the workers who sustain students and faculty by:
• Scheduling Classes
• Enrolling Students
• Booking Classrooms and Medical Appointments
• Stocking Library Shelves
• Heating and Cooling our Classrooms
• Keeping our Computers Running
• And more…

Why would they Strike?

The University Administration has proposed:
• 2.25% wage increase (clerical and technical workers) = $850.00/yr for the average striker who makes $34,000 annually
• 2.5% wage increase (heath care workers) = 1,050/yr for the average striker who makes $34,000 annually
• This proposal does not keep pace with projected inflation rates of 3.5%

Why did I hear they were offered over 4%?

• The University Administration reports that “94% of AFSCME employees would receive 8.5% or more in increases over the next 2 years (4.25% or more in each year of the contract)” (Carrier, 8/20/07).
• AFSCME workers object that their contract agreements provide for wage increases to have two components: 1) “across-the-board” increases reflect cost-of-living; 2) “step” increases recognize longevity. The top step represents the true value of the job. It already takes many AFSCME workers 20+ years to reach that step. In the meantime, they are underpaid in relation to the real value of the job.
• The Administration’s figure combines these two components. AFSCME claims that rolling the step increase into the “across-the-board” is an attack on step increases and leads to the continued devaluation of their pay scales and standard of living. Additionally, not all AFSCME workers receive a “step” increase.
• Earlier this year, Governor Tim Pawlenty agreed to give state workers a 3.25% raise in addition to step increases.

Can the U afford to pay more?

• It costs 1.1 million for each 1% increase to AFSCME out of a University budget of 1.5 billion
• State Rep. Lyndon Carlson, who chairs the House Finance Committee, told the City Pages that the state Legislature raised the University’s budget by 150 million over the next two years “to address an increase of 3.25%.” Lyndon added, “I interpreted that as a salary enhancement above the step increases” (8-29-2007).