Spam Poetry

The Proposition

(A poem created from spam comments posted on my class website. Some punctuation added, but all text was posted on blog, but spammers deserve neither citation nor quotation, and they get neither.) 

Mammoth account you possess.

It offers a nice unique twist on things.

A great deal of visitors.

How do you promote it?

advertise it?

get traffic to it?

I guess having something authentic or substantial to say

is the most important factor.

I’d come to accede with you here

see eye to eye with you here.

play ball with you on this.

Which is not something I typically do.

I really like reading a post that will make people think

dead text 

imply dry enterprise otherwise 

arise back night,

tear above safety 

I’d come to comply with you on this.

Thanks for allowing me to speak my mind!

Thanks for allowing me to speak my mind.

Thanks for allowing me to speak my mind.

Not above begging for my students...

If you need some last-minute tax-deductible giving, feel free to give to my currently open Donor's Choose projects for my class.  On behalf of my students, thanks!!

Jason's Christmas Song Rule #1:

I Can Teach a Man to Fish, but I Need Help Buying Bait

Guest editorial on Ace Weekly's blog. If you are a teacher or would like to help teachers, you need to check out DonorsChoose.org (link in the editorial).

Just needed to post something...so ashamed.

Not Pomplamoose's best musical effort, but I like Pomplamoose, Ben Folds, and Nick Hornby. Put them in a room together, and I'm for it.

Link to Youtube

US-Slovenia commentary and Preview of US-Algeria

The next in my series of columns on the US World Cup journey for
The Winchester Sun. The Sports Editor of the Danville Advocate-Messenger has also expressed interest in running these columns now.

Unfortunately, there are a couple of editorial typos - one omitting a "so" in my paragraph on Onyewu and a fused sentence resulting from combining two of my sentences in the paragraph beginning "Once again," Not that I'm picky.

Enjoy.

Fit to Be Tied (World Cup Commentary)

I've written a few pieces for our local paper The Winchester Sun giving commentary on US soccer matches while explaining a few aspects of soccer to the folks of Winchester, who do not tend to be soccer fans. This is my latest piece on the recent US-England tie.

That annoying sound you hear...

...is the whining of soccer traditionalists about the vuvuzelas--the plastic horns that you hear as an incessant background noise at the World Cup. Patrice Evra, captain of the French National Team (who between the rancor of strife in the French camp and the noise of prostitutes coming and going should be used to odd noises) has been particularly vocal in leading the charge to ban the South African soundmakers.

A telling perspective in the ESPN article above is John Leicester, an international AP reporter, who says the horns are "killing the atmosphere" and he is reported as complaining that the sound "is drowning out the oohs, aahs and cheers that lend excitement to the matches."

I will be the first to admit that the tinny, warbling noise does not seem a lovely soundtrack for the Beautiful Game. But I think to say it is "killing the atmosphere" suggests there is a singular, consistent atmosphere to international soccer games, when certainly that isn't the case.

The cacophonous chants of British (and many European teams) echo across the stadia. When I've seen the English National team play in the old Wembley and at Soldier Field, the sound was deafening and certainly impacted the players' ability to communicate on the pitch.

The "Samba" music at Brazilian games (and some other Central American and South American nations) results in a consistent musical backdrop that ebbs and flows with the game but which runs throughout the match.

This is the first World Cup played on the African continent. And in the same way that Cameroon infuriated some Europeans in 1990 by having the temerity to play aggressively against them, I think the problem isn't that the Africans are ruining the atmosphere of the games; I think it is that they are not simply embracing and reproducing the conventions of traditional European and South American soccer culture.

Though there is certainly debate on the origins of the horn (since all I can read is English language analysis, it is possible there is less debate than there appears), the vuvuzela is said to be a traditional part of South African culture, and it is undeniably a longstanding part of South African soccer culture. One cannot find a single historical account or piece of match footage including South African teams that does not include the backdrop of the vuvuzelas.

So Patrice Evra and his ilk would seem to want the South African fans to stop what they've been doing for years at soccer matches lest it offend the ears of the traditional powers. If FIFA kowtows to these traditionalists, it sets an awful precedent of trying to squash unique atmospheres and local footballing cultures in order to create a uniform product. Such a decision would fly in the face of the values FIFA claims it supports.

Church Builds a New Facility in its Existing Neighborhood (Film at Eleven)

One of the Fox News lead stories: "Mosque to be built near Ground Zero" (never mind that it is a religious community has been in that neighborhood for 40 years, so the only possible reason to feature this story is to scare people and paint all Muslims as violent).

One of the CNN lead stories: "Church's Faith Healing Under Scrutiny" (never mind that this is some incredibly weird and isolated religious group and by prominently featuring them you smear other Christians as anti-intellectual nut-jobs).

If news has stopped attempting to inform, and it has become a set of deliberately constructed narratives trying to separate and scare us, what hope do we have of coming to an informed decision and solving anything? Do we not care what works as long as our side wins?

Very cynical on this Election Day eve.

"Undergrowth" on Public Republic

My flash fiction piece "Undergrowth" was just published on Public Republic. Check it out.

What Happens in WinVegas (and may not for much longer)

(Apologies. Venting)

A story of mine, which has been politely rejected on some of the finest letterhead in the literary publishing universe, features a scene in which a husband and wife argue about living in a small town. The husband loves the peace and serenity of the small town while the wife--having spent some time living in London--feels smothered in what she sees as a backwater village. Friends reading this might think it recounts a debate between Andrea and me; in fact, it is a debate that I've had with myself many times over since we moved from Lexington eight years ago.

We came to Winchester because it was a map dot geographically centered between Lexington (where I worked at the time) and Stanton (where my wife had just been hired as a Public Defender). A few months before the move, I decided to drive around and get a feel for where we would want to rent a house. We weren't sure about leaving Lexington, so we planned to rent and see how Winchester worked out. I drove out Winchester Road and came upon the intersection of US60 and the Bypass in Winchester, a cluttered, electric line crisscrossed vista of fast food signs and dingy looking businesses.

I managed to overcome my impulse to immediately turn around.

But over the course of several trips, I found that it is always unfair to judge a town by the road designed to bypass it, and discovered a lot of really beautiful and charming neighborhoods in town. We also met many wonderful, creative, interesting people here and after several months, we went ahead and bought our first house. Even after Andrea changed jobs and both of us were working in Lexington, we decided to stay here because we've come to know and love so many friends here in WinVegas. (or Funchester. Or Gun City. Take your pick).

However, people who live in small towns by choice often face weekends like this one, which are exciting and frustrating in equal measure.

With a lot of our friends, we are dedicated to support local events and businesses. We have been to planning and zoning meetings to support the Winchester Travelling Trail and Rails to Trails. We aggressively evangelize locally owned restaurants and art venues. If a national speaker is invited to the Leeds Theater or a local church, we go. We could easily bolt out the 15 minutes to Lexington, but we think Winchester is a beautiful place and it deserves a more vibrant cultural life.

This vision isn't just the pipe dream of a few crackpot, artsy types. Complaining about a lack of restaurants and "things to do" is quite a popular pastime here in town, so highlighting these local activities and eateries is a response to an existing community desire.

So this weekend should have been a chance for Winchester to shine.

Stinky & Coco's--a fantastic and new diner with a very odd name, an owner who's operated restaurants in Chicago, and a very interesting breakfast and lunch menu, was open for dinner. Lexington-based artist Helene Steene had an opening at the Winchester Opera House gallery with music, a wine tasting, and fantastic food. National artist Antsy McClain & The Trailer Park Troubadours was performing at the Leeds and putting on their unique fusion of country, rockabilly and Garrison Keillor-style folksy storytelling. All of that entertainment would put a couple back less than $50.

The result?

Admittedly, we were only there for about 30 minutes, but only a few other people came into the restaurant, missing out on a Triple Berry pie (raspberry, blackberry, strawberry) that was, as the kids say nowadays, redonkulous. The gallery opening was reasonably well attended, but I'm curious how many of the people came from Lexington, because I didn't recognize very many of the other attendees (Winchester is small, people). But then the Leeds show, at $15 a ticket for 3 hours of great music and humor, drew (in my rough estimation) about 60-70 people.

My wife and I and our guest had a fantastic time. But seeing the poor attendance left me crestfallen.

I don't expect us to bring in the Royal Shakespeare Company. I don't expect the Marina Abramovic exhibit to swing into town after it leaves New York. I do, however, still want to expect something. Something beyond regularly taking my money fifteen minutes down the road to Lexington and watching our local arts venues and restaurants slowly falter and lock up their doors.

Some of the problems are failures of marketing. I will certainly be contacting several of these venues to show them how to more effectively use their healthy Facebook groups to drive attendance. But it also depends on the citizens of Winchester. If we want "something to do" then we must demonstrate that booking an event in Winchester means a full crowd and a reasonable profit. We must make supporting these opportunities a matter of principle.

If we don't want to just be a bedroom community for Lexington, we must do better.

Photo above (C) 2010 Jason McKinley Williams

To Persuade, To Inform, To Entertain: What is the purpose of the evening news? (choose two)

The great thing about teaching English is that every moment is a "teachable moment." Awash in language and communication, it takes little effort to find something in the real world to illustrate what you are teaching.

The content Kentucky educators are supposed to teach students is prescribed in something called the Program of Studies (POS). For English, the term "content" is a bit of a misnomer, because the POS does not mandate readings or assignments, but rather a set of reading, speaking, and writing skills that students should master. I maintain a chart with these skills and regularly grade each class (red, yellow, green) on how well the students have mastered a skill.

Recently, I realized we were "yellow" on identifying the purpose of a piece of writing. We've certainly exercised this skill, but since we typically teach only one type of writing in each unit, the students hadn't been simultaneously presented with multiple texts and asked to decide the purpose (inform, persuade, entertain) for each one.

So I put together a mini-unit of activities for the first ten minutes or so of several classes. I had the students read brief passages and then articulate the purpose of the text and what textual clues they'd used to discern it. All well and good, but talking about stand-alone excerpts of text felt a little de-contextualized to me.

So, I was eating lunch, reading the news, and the teachable moment presented itself.

I opened up Fox News and took a screenshot of the main page. Predictably, it was a tale of how the country is being led into Socialist ruin by the Obama administration. There were headlines on the Massa controversy, 6-7 stories about how health care reform is hated by Americans and doomed to fail, mockery of "Climate-Gate" (the recent revelations of redacted research on Global Warming) and a sarcastic story title about the United Nations. "Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria."

So then I went to CBSNews.com. Just as predictably, the website praised the Obama administration's leadership and vision. Jobless rates were down. Foreclosures were down. While assisting Nancy Pelosi on saving America through health care reform, President Obama was increasing exports to other countries. Change had come to fruition; morning had broken in America.

So I showed the students the two screenshots of the US news (taken seconds apart), and asked them to identify the purpose for these pieces of writing. In some classes, a few hands flew up and said that the purpose of news stories was to inform. I agreed, but then I asked them to do what they'd been doing--look at the text and find evidence to support their answer. Shortly afterward, the students started murmuring--then answering out loud--that the writers' purpose was clearly to persuade.

I stressed that I would never tell them what political view to hold, but I wanted them to understand that they needed to be conscious of the bias so they could consider that persuasive intent in assessing the information presented. In the discussion that followed, some classes made it clear that they understood the necessary conclusions: Never trust one source. Look at multiple views and make up your own mind.

I recognize that heavily politicized journalism is neither novel nor specific to US news, but it's sad that the easiest way to find heavily biased writing is to peruse the front pages of websites designed to give us data about our world.

The scariest part is that I don't believe the tin-foil hat wearers who claim we're being manipulated by covert political machines and duped into accepting spin for news; I'm afraid we're getting exactly the news we want. A pre-designed narrative is so much more unified, coherent, and soothing than the discordant, nuanced truth.

The latter requires real thought, compromise, and engagement. The former asks us to simply lie back, close our eyes, and listen to the sounds of the story. We already know how it ends, so it's just fine if we go ahead and fall asleep.

Restraint

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. --Ernest Hemingway

It may seem ironic for a fan or William Faulkner, but I have always loved restraint in the prose writer. By restraint, I mean the capacity to relay a scene without unnecessary adornment. It is to have faith that the ability to conjure something real from words is miraculous--it does not require verbal pyrotechnics likely to merely distract us from this picture of the truth you've given the reader.

I'm thinking of this right now because it seems a lot of the contemporary fiction I'm reading (perhaps in reaction to a sort of empty minimalism in fiction a few years back) is piling on the adverbs and adjectives, dragging out the thesaurus for the most arcane verb, and offering metaphor where the vehicle adds nothing to the tenor.

Being a largely unpublished writer myself, I won't pick on specific writers who are doing the work and certainly having much more success then I am. But, in my other open Chrome tabs, I have a few passages that seem wholeheartedly willing to sacrifice substance (like Isaac, his sweating chest heaving under his father's dagger) for a showy sentence that weaves and frolics across the page like a ballerina coquettishly luring the spotlight to follow every frolicsome step.

In any case, I speak not as an aspiring writer here, but as a reader. I may never be widely published, but I can still aim to be widely read. And I can applaud what I like.

An ideal example of restrained prose is Ernest Hemingway's classic "Hills Like White Elephants." The story's so-called "Camera Eye" narrator relays a third-person view on events, offering no judgment or insight other then that we can infer from what is spoken and what is left unsaid.

When I teach this to sophomores, many read the initial page or so with some confusion because they're used to having things spelled out for them. Here's an excerpt from the beginning of the story, in which a man and a woman drink at a train station, substituting sniping comments and small talk for the real discussion they need to be having:

‘It tastes like liquorice,’ the girl said and put the glass down.

‘That’s the way with everything.’

‘Yes,’ said the girl. ‘Everything tastes of liquorice. Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for, like absinthe.’

‘Oh, cut it out.’

‘You started it,’ the girl said. ‘I was being amused. I was having a fine time.’

‘Well, let’s try and have a fine time.’

‘All right. I was trying. I said the mountains looked like white elephants. Wasn’t that bright?’

‘That was bright.’

‘I wanted to try this new drink. That’s all we do, isn’t it – look at things and try new drinks?’

‘I guess so.’

The girl looked across at the hills.

‘They’re lovely hills,’ she said. ‘They don’t really look like white elephants. I just meant the colouring of their skin through the trees.’

‘Should we have another drink?’

Notice a few things:

* There is a complete lack of quote attribution in most cases. First, Hemingway expects the reader to internally alternate the quotes between the characters. Even when attribution is given, it is bare-bones: "the girl said," "she said," "said the girl." There's no need to add "sarcastically" to her comment: "Wasn't that bright?" My 16 year-old students recognize the sarcasm instantly. The word choice and phrasing reflects tone without requiring a nudge from the author

* Every detail matters. "The girl looked across at the hills." Taken on its own, this description of action does not amount to much. But since there is limited description by the narrator, every action is important. The way the two characters look out on the landscape around the station proves to tell us a great deal about their feelings.

* Don't talk if you don't have anything to say. Like a great English soccer announcer, Hemingway's narrator only speaks when there's something worth mentioning. Students sometimes think they are slamming back drinks in this passage, but, inevitably, a few realize that the reason it takes them only a few lines of dialogue between drink orders is that most of their conversation is spent in silence, with the sparse few lines indicating how little they are speaking as they uneasily drink.

I think Hemingway's approach is not only beautiful in its efficiency, it is also very respectful of the reader. It forces (or permits) the reader to fill in the blanks with reasonable inferences based on the limited but sufficient details provided. One of the reasons my students like this story so much is that they have to "figure it out." The focus, then, is on the reader's experience with the material, not the author's capacity to impress.

My brush with fame...

Anyone who has known me for a while has heard me discuss the significant personal impact left by my most cherished brush with fame.

Sure, I've also met Tubby Smith a few times at various charity events he sponsored. I also stood within earshot of Darius Rucker and the rest of the Blowfish and explained to a friend how I thought this awful band was going nowhere. But the moment that sticks most indelibly in my mind is the 1:00AM meeting I had with Ashland, Kentucky's most famous son, Chuck Woolery.

Circa 1993, I stepped out into the chilly night air at the Movies 10 in Ashland, and mentioned to a friend that Chuck Woolery was standing on the corner. As it turned out, he was waiting for his significantly younger Love Connection to exit the cinema.

The friend didn't believe it was him (surely such a luminary wouldn't deign to watch a movie with the great unwashed). So I went up to introduce myself and establish his identity. I created the short film below, which recreates the conversation that followed with 100% accuracy:

I've really never been the same.

Typo Positive

“A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.” -- James Joyce

During my now five-day weekend, I've been curled up with many student essay drafts, spilling out the remnants of four pens (two black, one blue, one red) onto their pages. As a grader, I have two things I try to keep in mind:

1) Students tend to wait until the last minute to make changes, so I don't want to write "awk" or "rephrase" or something that will leave them dumbfounded at 2:00AM the night before the final paper is due. So I tend to write quite a bit of explanation on the pages. (In a few instances, I've actually written more words than the student's effort contained.) My hope is to provide a guiding, meaningful voice for those students racing against sleepiness and the morning alarm.

2) I need to keep a notepad or laptop next to me so that I can capture (a) positive or negative examples (transitions, use of evidence, passive voice) for later student instruction and (b) unintentionally funny mistakes for my own enjoyment.

I suspect many English teachers keep such a list, and I'll share a few of my favorites (these are students from long ago, and they are all in their early thirties now). What we called "error analysis" in my old life in software development should illuminate these examples:

The "I've never written that word before" Error

If you are not well-read, it is easy to have a word in your vocabulary that you know only as a sound associated with a concept. Having never seen it in print, you must improvise.

* I had never before been asked to serve as a paw bearer.

The rain lashed down on the mourners, bowed and whimpering at the sight of the huge paw being borne into the small, country church.

* These students from different religions can help their fellow pears understand all cultures and feel more of a community with all people.

Though they try to hide it with their parochialistic bluster, Pears--all to often--feel so alone.

* Mr. Webber has been found guilty of many Mister Meaner crimes.

No commentary necessary.

The Spell Check Error

For those of us who remember the days before it was ubiquitous, spell check is a godsend. But like any great power, it requires great responsibility and caution in its use.

* The purpose of the KIRAS state assessments is to ovulate students and schools.

This from a college student. Thank God those tests were eliminated before I started teaching high school.

* In a multicultural cirrocumuli, students are given the opportunity to study such greets as Maya Angelo, W.E.B. Dubious, and William Falconer

This is really a treasure.

Falconer has always been my favorite author, but I'm not sure why a high altitude, billowy cloud of multiculturalism would be required to read the utterly WASPish literary giant. Nor is it clear how a cultural diversity-endorsing mass of water vapor would promote Mrs. Angelo -- with whom I'm not familiar.

Less confusing is said cloud's desire to advocate the work of Mr. Dubious, who found time amidst his busy career as a super villain to be a momentous figure in the civil rights movement in the early 20th century. He was truly one of the greets.

I'm headed back to the piles of papers, so there are certainly more to come.

Eternal Vigilance

The RedRoom Blog contest for the week has me brainstorming about the concept of freedom. So I'm free(dom) associating and doing my best Toby Keith impersonation. Minus the jingoism and xenophobia.

Freedom is...

=====================================

. ...taken for granted. I recall with clarity the day I learned this fact: the police cracking batons against the door, the screaming as they flung it open, and the hostel keeper telling us to get out of our beds and pull our luggage into the floor.

I was in Edinborough, Scotland, sleeping in a hostel with 50 or so of my closest friends in closely arranged double metal bunk beds with naked mattresses. My eyes burned when the police flipped on the florescent lights and roused everyone. It was 4:00 AM.

I was on a week's vacation from the school where I was studying in London, and though my friends and I arrived early in the evening, we decided (with practicality typical of 20 year-olds) that rooms would be easy to come by, so a better way to spend the dying twilight was to hang out on the parapets of Edinborough Castle.

(Side note: we stopped at a pub and ordered fried fish for dinner, and after 40 minutes, asked the barkeep if it was ready. Stunned, he swore loudly, raced to the kitchen, apologized profusely, and after another 15 minutes, we got a free meal.)

These distractions meant we waited until about 11:30 to find a place to sleep, which (after being told "no vacancy" at many stops) relegated us to a hostel in a fairly impoverished neighborhood. I cocooned myself in the blanket they provided and, despite the crackling sound of the plastic mattress cover, I finally drifted off to sleep until awakened by the clanging on the metal door.

Something had apparently been stolen in the area, so they were going through the hostel, searching everyone's luggage. I walked away from my bunk in a somnambulistic haze. But while their hands unzipping and feeling through my luggage soon jarred me perfectly awake, I felt no less stunned.

One doesn't take one's constitution abroad. Scots law is very clear on the police's right to search you without a warrant if something's gone missing. I moreover realized that we were likely suffering this interrogation in no small part because the hostel was made up of 25% backpacking Americans and 75% poor people with nowhere else to go.

And while it is patently true that abuses like this are more common among the powerless even here in the U.S., that night I assuaged my bitterness with the knowledge that there was at least a piece of paper--a statement of principle--that said individual privacy still meant something back home. If we sadly fall short of it, then thank God we at least have something of which we are falling short.

So when someone tells you that we should go into "high crime" neighborhoods and just search for drugs without real probable cause since "we know they're there" or that "I don't care if the government taps my phone because I've got nothing to hide," remember that we have some profound liberties in the US, written into law by people who were conversant with violations of civil liberty in practical, rather than abstract, terms.

And, most certainly remember that freedoms are rarely taken from our citizens by force. Usually, in the name of security, or patriotism, or religion, or party, the citizens hand them right over.

Know them by their fruits, or alternatively, by their novelty plates.

Standing in line at the Thornton's gas station near my neighborhood, I spied a rack of novelty car plates--the kind you screw to the front of your car to make sure your it professes your religious beliefs or sports team affiliation or desire to waste your presidential vote on the dangerously inexperienced Willie Nelson.

The plates were stacked deeply on the rotating rack, and these were the four I saw:

1) Against a deep purple background, a hot pink script proclaimed the car's occupant "Blessed"

2) On black, the red, slashed lettering let everyone know the driver was "Sucking Gas and Hauling Ass."

3) Three red crosses centered in a white background admitted the car's owner was "Not Perfect--Just forgiven."

4) Another white background, this time with cartoon rhino warning the reader: "Cautious: Extremely Horny."

An open tension between sacred and profane shapes the atmosphere of so many small Kentucky towns. For my money, no literary work captures this as perfectly as Silas House's Clay's Quilt.

While this little rack of novelty plates did not sum up this tension quite as well, it certainly did so more succinctly--in just about the time it takes the old guy in front of the line to finish up his scratch off tickets.

My Thesis Statement

But criticism, real criticism, is essentially the exercise of this very quality; it obeys an instinct prompting it to try to know the best that is known and thought in the world...
-- Matthew Arnold "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (1864)

Not long ago, when I was near UK's campus in Lexington, I swung by the William T Young library, hoping to take a look at something I wrote ten years ago.

On a bookshelf in the basement, I have a version of my Master's Thesis that I preserved in the most resplendent form available to my grad student means: a Kinko's strip binding.

However, I knew that unless the Graduate School took my $80 and bought a seat cushion for Steven Masiello, a leather bound, golden embossed copy of my contribution to English Literature rested somewhere in the tower atop the William T. Young library. After a good discussion with my former committee member, Jonathan Allison, I saddled up to a computer, looking for my manifesto.

Sadly, the as-of-yet-uncorrected misspelling in my Thesis's catalog citation ("The Yankees of Yoknapatawpha: William Faulkner and the Hartless [sic] Yankee Myth") was an inauspicious beginning to my glorious return to the halls of academia. But, having spent a solid year of my life both arriving and departing this building under starry skies, I had little difficulty ascending the steps and finding the appropriate bookshelves.

The Young library's stacks are the space-saving mechanical kind that slide back and forth--the racks compressing and decompressing like an accordion. Having found the right rack and waited for it to groan open, I slid my finger along the spines.

There it was.

No misspelling on the binding, thank God. Jason McKinley Williams in a golden sheen surely commensurate with the glorious revelations within this thin tome.

Unfortunately, when I opened it, the crisp pages crackled like those in a college dropout's Calculus book. It seems neither the world of Faulkner studies nor (shockingly) the public at large had been poring over my analysis of how Faulkner reframed popular turn-of-the-century narratives about "Bloody Reconstruction" in his own treatments of both that historical era and the desegregation struggle that filled him with both immeasurable hope and intense anxiety.

Their loss.

I hardly even looked at it beyond the Acknowledgments page. After all, though eighty pages and ten years in my past, I could probably recite it from memory. I slid it back into the shelf, content.

Then, my fingers crept across the names of old colleagues, and I think about those stacks of books piled up in each of the monastic cells that passed for Teaching Assistant offices (6 TA cubicles in the same space as one professor's office). I think the strain and preparation of sharing our ideas at conferences. I think of literally reams of paper crumpled and marked over--the ideas discussed over turkey sandwich lunches or beers at McCarthy's.

Though you might expect disappointment to be my appropriate response, I assure you this is not a lament. "Terminal Master's students" (as those of us not going on to Doctoral study were known) understood that after our degree comes in the mail, the best end for our scholarship was to end up in someone else's works cited page. But to stand there in those racks was simply a valuable lesson on having perspective in our daily lives. To ponder the wondrous toil and passion of those days, and see it neatly stacked in alphabetical order, resting quietly in endless row of other people's black, gold embossed legacies.

Faulkner, who wrote so prolifically and almost exclusively about the inhabitants of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County once said, "I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it."

Even if the influence of my scholarship remains limited to a few colleagues at UK and the audiences of a couple of sessions at the Twentieth Century Literature Conference, I'm very pleased at my little postage stamp of Faulkner studies. It wasn't specious, it wasn't pretentious, and it will remain my little brick in UK's symbolic tower of knowledge (at least until they clear out the Thesis and Dissertations and turn the tower into sports equipment storage or a Kindle repair shop.)

I can say I learned it, said it, finished it, and, in the end, it was the best I knew and thought.

The blank page as a mine (mind?) field

"Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything really good." -- William Faulkner

It's amazing to me how this generation of young people, which likely writes so much more than many previous generations (though in the fragmentary phrases and phonetic inventions of text messaging speech) seems so paralyzed by the blank page.

The academic achievement of the student does not seem to matter; high performing students and low performing students alike will say to me repeatedly: "I don't know how to start."

At first, I presumed their anxiety came from the challenge of writing an introduction. Any conscientious writer knows well the tension inherent in moving quickly from nothingness into an engaging piece of writing. However, even my attempts to have them defer the introduction altogether--just write a thesis and then go into the first point--fail for many writers.

Many years ago, I read a writing instructor refer to some students seeing the blank page as a mine field--a place where their pens or pencils travel gingerly because mistakes and failures lie everywhere. My first go-round of teaching, I saw a few of these students. Now, a large proportion seem to write just waiting for the explosion.

To counter this anxiety, I'm trying hard to have them express their ideas in whatever language seems comfortable. If the tone is informal, actually conversational, or even in text speak, I'll take it on the draft if that's what is required to get their hands and minds to move confidently across the page. "My paper will sound totally ghetto," one student told me today. However, I feel confident we can work to get their diction and tone correct in revision if we can just get them comfortable expressing on paper the great ideas they express so willingly when I ask them to talk about their position.

There are people who would say this is capitulating to the forces breaking down the English language. Maybe it is. But for me this is not a theoretical issue; I have 16- and 18-year-olds showing up each day and I'm paid to make them better readers, writers, and thinkers by the time they leave.

I simply believe that if students come to high school hearing only non-standard English at home, practicing non-standard English through constant text messaging, and lacking the wide reading that might tune one's ear to standard English, Language Arts teachers are forced to get them to express their ideas in whatever way possible.

I just think I can teach proper English employing a draft loaded down with colloquialisms, but I can't teach students how to better express their ideas if those ideas never make it past the pen.

Rediscovering Snow Days

When I decided to leave my career in software development to teach English, I knew that my thorough planning for the switch could never prepare me for everything I would encounter in my new vocation.

Some of these unexpected experiences have been arduous and challenging. Some have been exhilarating and profoundly gratifying. Some seem simply absurd.

In that last category, I place "rediscovering snow days."

Mind you, the beauty of re-encountering snow days in my mid-thirties doesn't derive from merely missing work; sloth has never been my sin of choice. When my cell phone shudders awake on the bedstand and Bill Meck's missive shimmers with the good news, I immediately jump out of bed. I inevitably spend the morning grading or making lesson plans, relishing the completion of these tasks in serenity, outside the pandemonium of the school day.

In any case, we teachers work very long hours, but we get plenty of time off during the year.

No, the absurdity and beauty I've discovered in the snow day come from re-connecting with this experience I had presumed I'd left behind. Like a sort of meteorological prodigal son, I abandoned the delight of having the elements dictate my daily work, and now I have recaptured that sublime joy.

(OK, perhaps too far.)

Regardless, things that are great about Snow Days:

The Anticipation:
Standing transfixed in her closet, trying to determine what to wear, my wife used to ask me about the forecast, and I never had the slightest idea. I worked in a climate-controlled environment that never closed and therefore wholeheartedly ignored the weather.

Now, between December 1 and March 1, I can tell her the barometric pressure in inches of Mercury and hectoPascals. I scrutinize the subtle shifts in time stamps of Doppler radar like Jim Garrison pored over the frames of the Zapruder film. I could stand in for T.G. Shuck if the situation ever arose.

Not working and feeling great
When most people have an unplanned absence from work, either illness or bereavement is the cause. Both are physically and mentally taxing, and that fatigue is exacerbated by your knowledge of the work piling up while you are gone.

Not so for the snow day. The weather did something unusual, so you don't have to work. You may feel great. If the roads clear up, you may go out and see a movie. If you see your boss there, that's fine too. He or she is also feeling great.

Playing in the snow
My back yard spills down into a valley and is obscured from the neighbors, so I can frolic to my heart's content or my back gives out. And since my dog Scout (pictured) is so adept at making a canine version of snow angels, it's only right she should be afforded the opportunity.

Sure, it takes about 20 minutes to remove all the caked-on snow and get her dry, but what do I care? It's a snow day.