Someday I will discover the secret to making the first day of class not desperately dull.  Alas, I haven’t figured it out yet.  The dullness has in part to do with the emphasis on policy-download during that first session, which is simply tedious, any way you slice it.  But it also has to do with my first-day nervousness, which makes me unfocused and a bit blathery.

This is far from an ideal combination.

That said, I’m very excited by both of my classes, both by the material I’ve laid out for us to work on this semester and by the students who’ve signed up.  (Assuming I haven’t bored them all away yet.) It promises to be a great, if busy, fall.

My classes, both of which will be blogging this semester:

– ENGL 170L, Special Topics in Contemporary Fiction: Writing Machines.

– MS 190, Senior Seminar in Media Studies: Authorship.

In his new memoir, “The Discomfort Zone,” Mr. Franzen turns his unforgiving eye on himself and succeeds in giving us an odious self-portrait of the artist as a young jackass: petulant, pompous, obsessive, selfish and overwhelmingly self-absorbed…. While some readers will want to give Mr. Franzen points for being so revealing about himself, there is something oddly preening about his self-inventory of sins, as though he actually reveled in being so disagreeable. And while it doubtless takes a degree of self-absorption for anyone to write a memoir, in the case of this book the author’s self-involvement not only makes for an incredibly annoying portrait, but also funnels the narrative into a dismayingly narrow channel.

Yikes.

As long as I’m on the subject:  one of the things that I actually have spent a bit of time worrying about—worrying, mind you, but not enough to really do anything about it—since I discovered among my readership a number of folks in positions of authority, folks whose good opinions of me I’d like to maintain, and whose judgments of me matter, is my tendency toward a vocabulary more befitting a member of the merchant marine than my own decidedly unsalty self.  Some of it’s laziness, and some of it’s a carefully cultivated shock value, but get me in casual conversation about something I really care about, and chances are there’s an f-bomb on the horizon.

Which is not to say I don’t censor myself, or that my censor sometimes flags; I’m always critically conscious of my audience, and have never, even under the most exigent circumstances, let such a bomb drop in front of, say, my mother, or anyone else who I’m pretty sure wouldn’t respond well.

But here, on the blog, my sense is always that I’m having a conversation with friends, or if not friends, at least the kinds of acquaintances who’ve decided to drop by and listen, and thus I feel much less compunction about such filtering.

On the other hand, though, this is where the concerns I’ve heard lately about professional self-presentation do in fact have some purchase with me.  For a reason that I cannot quite yet put my finger on, I’m far less concerned that someone in some relative position of authority with respect to me might read the post about my last mammogram, for instance, than that said person might be turned off by my casual vulgarity.

This is a crossroads of a sort, the decision about whether or not to pay some attention filtering my language.  Perhaps it’s just common sense, common courtesy, something of that order.  Or perhaps it’s the leading edge of losing my voice here, of making the character you’re constructing from what I’ve written here somehow less me.

I’ve had a few conversations about this here website of late, conversations with folks who seem uncomfortable with the personal nature of some of what I’ve blogged here.  Nobody’s upset with me about having been indiscreet, or about having said something about them that I shouldn’t have.  Rather, they’re concerned (albeit in different ways, and for different reasons) about my level of self-disclosure, and particularly with the ways that such disclosure might interfere with my professional self-presentation.

I’ve spent the last few days of silence trying to figure out how I feel about their discomfort.

The part of me that’s held off on posting anything takes these concerns seriously, and has tried to think through the question of how much I want to reveal here, and why, where I cross the line, where the line lies, and what purposes, for that matter, the line serves.  Much of the rest of me is having a hard time not finding this anxiety—both theirs and my own, as spawned by theirs—quite hysterically funny.  Because, yeah, I often post here about things that one might find a bit “personal,” at least in the sense of not being about work.

I’m just not sure why anybody would be surprised by that.

Because, damnit, isn’t part of the point of the blog that the personal and the public (and thus the personal and the professional) are so mutually implicated as to be inseparable?  That intellectual life is a profoundly personal experience, and that our lives outside the seminar room are as much in need of examination as anything inside it?  That, as Dr. B has at moments been fond of saying, academics are more than brains on sticks?  That our desire to distill the purely professional for public consumption, casting aside the personal, participates in the myth of the neutral, objective, disinterested scholar that we’ve done our best to reject on a theoretical level?

Isn’t part of the point of the blog—or at least this blog—the liberation of the personal from the slag-heap of academia, and an exploration of its co-implication with the professional?

I’m in the midst of a project that’s primarily about personal blogs, the ways that such blogs are dismissed as a kind of neurotic oversharing, and the reasons that such dismissals are a huge mistake.  And the purposes such dismissals, whether meaning to or not, must serve.  So I’m realizing that the main thing that all this concern about my dangerously unprofessional self-disclosure is making me want to do is theorize that writing, by bringing parts of the article I’m working on here for some early-stage discussion.

We’ve long since forgotten that the personal is political.  I’m not sure why it surprises me to find resistance to the notion that the personal might be professional, as well.

It’s not to be helped or avoided at this point:  it’s my birthday.  The first one I’ve really dreaded in about… well, in pretty much precisely a decade.  Interestingly, it’s not a big round number type birthday, but the one before it, which to my way of thinking is worse, apparently.  Turning 29 stank: it was nothing but a year-long reminder that my twenties were almost over, and that, being still in grad school, I hadn’t gotten much of anywhere, that decade.  Turning 30, however, was fabulous:  a whole new decade, wide open before me, with endless possibilities.  And it turns out to have been an appropriate start to what’s been a great nine years.

But now, here I am at the birthday before the big one again, and while my angst this time out has nothing to do with any feeling of lack of accomplishment (even I’m not that silly, particularly not this summer), I’ve still got that end-of-things feeling.  Perhaps I’m deluding myself into thinking that I’d rather be turning 40.  Perhaps next year I’ll feel worse rather than better.  Perhaps this is just the way of birthdays at this age.  But I’ve nonetheless got a touch of the bleh today.

I’ve planned myself a good day, culminating in my flights back to SoCal.  So tomorrow morning, this long bout of travel and the aggravation of turning 39 will be over.  Instead, I’ll be in the thick of the pre-semester startup, with little time for such whining as this.

Okay, (a): Did you realize that Rocky is, and I shit you not, thirty years old, this year?

(b): Did you know that it was possible, tonight, somewhere in the world, to sit outside and drink a bunch of champagne to sorta celebrate your altogether alarming birthday (which was not today; no good wishes yet, damnit; I’ve got something less than forty-eight hours before it’s official) and watch this movie outdoors on the big screen, and wind up making a bunch of guys from Queens right in front of you laugh when you say, in a guttural growl, at an entirely pertinent moment, “Yo, Adrian!”

Neither did I, is all I’m saying.

On another note:  what the New York Times looks like to the Right, courtesy of the Huffington Post.  Make sure you roll over the masthead a few times.  (Hat tip:  Scott.)

So I’m on the road again, in NYC, and I’m desperately trying to get done at least a small fraction of the stuff that has to be completed by a week from Tuesday. In the meantime, I’m completely exhausted from all the travel—my body clock is pretty screwed up from having jumped from EDT to PDT for two days, before jumping right back again—and so am trying to get a bit of rest around the edges, where I can.

The result is that I haven’t contacted any of the folks I ought to have gotten ahold of upon coming to town. I’ve spent some time with my sister, which has been great, but I just haven’t been able to do anything else, partially because I’ve been working, and partially because I’ve been so tired.

And the result of that, of course, is guilt. Massive guilt. Guilt disproportional to the offense, and thus, alongside that, a dread of picking up the phone to explain.

So, hoping to avoid a guilt death-spiral, I thought I’d send a little message to the folks I ought to have gotten ahold of here: I’m sorry. I’ll hope to touch base with you next time out. And I’ll hope that the next time out doesn’t come at the tail end of three weeks of traveling, and one week before several key deadlines.

After a particularly obnoxious argument over a final grade a couple of semesters ago, I decided to dramatically revamp the grading policy that I include in all my syllabi.  The dispute made clear to me that certain students (by no means all students, and I’d venture not even the majority of my students, but some students, nonetheless) have a sense that, in classes like the ones I teach, everyone begins the semester with an A, and that, barring any serious gaffes, they can end the semester with that A, easy-peasy.

This has never been how I have approached grading, and I thought I might avoid a number of niggling grade disputes if I communicated my actual practice of grading as straight-forwardly as possible.  I’ve only used this policy one semester so far—last fall, before I went on leave—but I had no complaints.  I’m testing it out again, and thought I’d post it here for comment.  And just generally to share, in the event that you’re looking for this sort of thing.

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There’s good news, for me, at least: because, on returning to the U.S., one goes through customs on the Canadian side of the border, and because one can’t check one’s suitcase until after customs, one goes through the duty-free store dragging one’s huge rolly bag. This used to be a pain, but now, in the fluid-free era, one has the opportunity to shove the two bottles of booze one purchased into said rolly bag prior to checking it in.

Of course, this doesn’t work when leaving the U.S., or when returning from anyplace other than Canada. So I’m wondering what changes in the structures of airports, or in check-in procedures, will be required by the new anti-liquid regime.